Exercise

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I decided to start walking in the mornings for a change. For a while now I've been on the treadmill, which has its advantages and its disadvantages. Obviously, it's indoors and therefore not dependent on the weather. And you can time it, and you can sense pretty easily whether you're giving yourself a decent workout by just looking at your speed setting. The thing is, when you rank the most boring things in the world, being on a treadmill has to fall somewhere close to judging declamation. So to make the time fly, I bought a little TV/VCR combo, and I watch stuff that works in a treadmill situation. Poker works real well. Fifty-seven-part series on the Civil War don't. You need something that's not too good or too dull that you don't really have to listen to, given that you're making a racket already. AFI's 100 Best Puppy Movies works. Rat Pack bios are perfect. Star Trek Enterprise is good, because it's so lousy you'd never actually sit down and watch it, but no one ever really does get enough Klingons in one's life so this is just the right fix. I have high hopes for Battlestar Galactica. I've been watching the miniseries, and it's quite good. Sexy cylons was a mighty inspiration! In my day they were just clunky robots, which may be why the original series fizzled out. Sexy robots, on the other hand, and the thing would probably still be in syndication. I've got the whole show on tape, ready for the treadmill. I just hope they don't default back to clunky robots.

But walking is different. You plug the old iPod into the old earholes and head out. The music is quickly inconsequential, provided that it's lively enough to keep you moving. That is, your Kindertotenlieder probably won't get you to the corner, if you know what I mean, and Gregorian chants would have you run over by the first Suburu to come along, but a little Steely Dan is just what the walking doctor ordered. Except maybe Boddhisattva. That one always stops me dead in my tracks. And to think, ol' Skunk is now a stockbroker.

Anyhow, as I was saying, walking is different. When you walk, your mind is free to work. And work it does. I had forgotten that. You just start traveling down various mental paths and working things out, your legs pumping away, the rhythms subconsciously keeping all your physical systems on go. After about 45 minutes I get back to the house with ideas for MHL trophies, a completely functional generic response to resolutional critiques (which I was clever enough to write down, with Pip's help—downside of any of this noodling is that if you don't take notes fairly quickly, you might as well have watched sexy robots on Battlestar Galactica), menu ideas for the next week and a serious longing to participate in the 50th Disneyland Anniversary. That's just one day. I'm going to get back into this for a while. Maybe I can come up with another novel.

Sexy robots will just have to wait.