Rich Mintz  

I felt like going for a ride today, so I rode up to Ess-a-Bagel on 1st Avenue, near Stuyvesant Town, picked up a dozen bagels and some cream cheese and salmon salad, and rode back. It’s 5 miles there and back (about 200 calories), and I’m about to eat a thousand calories worth of what I brought back, so there’s a lesson there, but I’d rather not think about it.

Because I was curious what it would look like on a map, I plotted my daily bike route from home to work and back again. I tagged a few of the points of interest, and some of the hazards.

View My daily bike route in a larger map

I take other routes from time to time, and branch off for errands and so forth; but after doing this for about a year, all other things being equal, on an ordinary day, I go exactly the same way up, and exactly the same way down — up 6th Avenue, and down 5th.

This route is the most direct, more or less. I used to divert to the bike lane along 8th Avenue (protected above 14th Street) in the morning, and the bike lane along 2nd Avenue and Allen Street (protected or separated almost the whole way) in the afternoon. But I’m a competent street rider, I’m familiar with the route, and I know most of the hazards, so I’m back on the straight route.

The morning ride is harder, both because there are some gentle uphill stretches and because traffic is heavier on 6th Avenue than on 5th. It’s a bit more than 2 1/2 miles each way — 2.6 miles in the morning, and a bit more in the afternoon.

One interesting fact is that on almost all my avenue portions, I’m riding on the left, not on the right. That’s true on 6th and 5th Avenues, and it’s also true on 1st and 2nd and 8th and 9th, because of where the bike lanes are. But even when I’m riding on 7th Avenue, which isn’t a designated bike route, or one of the avenue portions that aren’t marked for bikes, I tend to stay left rather than right — there are fewer buses and generally fewer obstructions.

Almost without exception, if there’s a bike lane provided (protected or not), that’s where I ride. Not only is it possibly required by city law (there’s been some dispute about this); it’s the place where those drivers who are looking out for cyclists are expecting to see us, so it’s where it’s safest for me to be.

And virtually the whole way, in both directions, I’m riding legally, with traffic and on the street. There is one significant exception, and that’s my confession: in the afternoon, when crossing Canal Street near the Holland Tunnel exit, I do something illegal and potentially dangerous. From the foot of Thompson Street (at 6th Avenue), I ride west across 6th Avenue, ride diagonally westward across Canal to the wrong side, do one short block against traffic on Canal, followed by a short southbound block on the sidewalk on Varick (to avoid cobblestones).

Here’s a snapshot of Google Street View facing southwest from Thompson and 6th (the starting point of this maneuver) in the direction I’m about to ride. Imagine me crossing behind the taxi you see there in the traffic, then riding along (toward the right in the frame) on the wrong side of Canal, passing the postal truck on its left.

I didn’t use to do it this way, but because of the way the street grid comes together, the alternative (cutting east to Broadway) is worse, involving more travel on more congested streets. I could, of course, walk my bike two longgggg blocks on the sidewalk, but that’s my fallback, not my starting plan.

Because of the timing of the lights at 6th Avenue and Varick, and the fact that there are usually NYPD traffic officers in both intersections, there’s not actually any traffic coming as I do my riding against traffic. And I’m actually protected by a curb cut ahead of me at Varick, so I’d be hard to hit accidentally. You can see the curb cut here, in the distance at left (live link this time):

View Larger Map

But you can believe I’m exceptionally careful before and during this tricky crossing, watching that all the traffic on Canal, 6th, Varick, and Laight Streets is behaving as expected.

Because of travel I was barely on a bike for 4 days, and I couldn’t stand the idea of waiting another day (this is how you know exercise is becoming a normal part of life — when you start getting antsy if you don’t do it). So, I thought, hang the snow, I’m going out today. I figured that everything would be pretty much plowed, and we only got a couple of inches in any case, and it was still above freezing, so why not?

And everything was fine. I went out on the Puma, figuring it would be the most stable on icy ground because it has the widest, nubbiest tires, a heavy frame, and a low center of gravity. But in the end I didn’t encounter any ice. Most of the travel lanes were plowed and sanded and salted, traffic was light, and I had a pretty much normal 5-mile roundtrip, via the Trader Joe’s in Chelsea. There was some slush, but I coasted through it carefully and had no undue problems.

The only problems came when I got home, and realized that both my undercarriage and my … undercarriage were covered in sandy muck, which you’ll see here. And about ten minutes after coming in, about a half-pound lump of semi-frozen sand glumped onto the floor. So my pants are now drying, and I’ll give the bike a washdown later this evening.

Severe Australian hair salon interventionist Tabatha Coffey is back for another season on Bravo, and this year Tabatha Takes Over isn’t just turning around hair salons, she’s taking on a range of retail businesses. And in episode two, she took on the turnaround of a business that meant a lot to me twenty years ago: Club Ripples, the gay club on the shore in Long Beach, California.

In 1993, I probably spent eight or ten Sunday afternoons at Ripples, driving down from LA with my boyfriend and meeting up with my Orange County friends. It was a convenient halfway point between us — in those days, I was living in West Hollywood and working in Costa Mesa, driving 50 miles each way in the carpool lane, passing Long Beach about midway — and it was nice to get out of the gay ghetto I lived in and experience another gay-friendly but not-quite-ghettoized community. And there were new people to look at and talk to, and Long Beach (population “only” 400,000) had a friendlier vibe than LA, and it was sunny and quiet and you could hear the seagulls. For a short time, we even considered buying a house in Belmont Shore, a gay-friendly neighborhood even then and much more affordable than LA, and moving.

Back then, Ripples on a Sunday was packed — it was a local hangout for gay people from Long Beach, a fun day trip from LA, and a magnet for gay people from Orange County. I was never really a bar person, and whenever I went to a gay club I felt like everyone else was prettier and more vivacious than me, not to mention in on something that nobody had bothered to let me in on. But Ripples felt incrementally warmer and more welcoming. People talked to you, and being by the beach made people a little less uptight. From LA it was a schlep, but I enjoyed it anyway.

Now it’s 20 years later, and Ripples has been suffering. It’s obvious from Tabatha’s show that some of its wounds were self-inflicted, and she did what she could to help with that (and through the happily-ever-after lens of a reality show, she appears to have succeeded). But it’s also true that the club scene has changed. One of the Ripples owners said this to Tabatha and she waved it away, but I think it’s true.

Even in 1993, which isn’t that long ago, there were many fewer ways to meet people than there are today. The modern coffeehouse scene was very new (no Starbucks, or almost none). There was no Internet as we know it now; nobody had a cellphone, let alone a smartphone; AOL charged by the minute. If you wanted to have a social experience with other gay people, you pretty much had to go to a bar and stand around until you saw someone you wanted to talk to. And so that’s what we did, even those of us who didn’t really like to drink and didn’t feel comfortable in those surroundings.

“Kids today” still go out and stand around, of course they do. The difference is that they don’t have to in order to be sociable; they have other choices. And so businesses have to be competitive, which is where I think Tabatha is right on. I hope her changes to Ripples stick, because the place meant a lot to me once — and it was open and serving gay people with a smile when I was six years old, which is a long history indeed.

I’m not a particularly high-living person. I buy my groceries at the supermarket, answer my own email and make my own appointments, fly in the back of the plane (usually). The pants I’m wearing today are from Marks & Spencer, which might sound elegant to Americans, but trust me, it isn’t. (For Angelenos of my vintage: the tone is about midway between The Broadway and Bullock’s, which means “nice but nothing fancy.”)

But everyone has their favorite cheap indulgences. For some people, it’s Starbucks lattes, and for others (hello, Ryan Davis), it’s ordering breakfast delivered, which (believe it or not) is almost considered normal behavior in New York.

And for me, too, there are areas of daily life where, if at all possible, I won’t compromise. I like my artisanal gin and my snooty coffee (although at the moment I’m drinking Trader Joe’s coffee out of an IKEA mug just like the 99 percent). I run the dishwasher whenever I feel like having a clean kitchen, even if it isn’t quite full yet. And I send my shirts out to the laundry.

I started sending my shirts out eons ago, in my mid-20s, during a time when I found myself really busy and was traveling a lot and it was hard to keep up with everything I had to do. It was my mother’s idea, one of her best ones ever — I recall she said at the time “It’s only a dollar, and that’s so little money, compared to the way the convenience makes you feel.” She was so right.

Rates have gone up in the past 20 years — I now pay $2.50 a shirt — but they come back in a box, neatly folded and wrapped in plastic and ready to wear, or drop into a suitcase (or a bike basket). Pull one out of the package, and it’s starched and neat. And all I had to do was walk to the corner and drop them off. The net is that I pay something like $20-$30 a month in exchange for feeling fresh and pretty every day, which I think is a fair trade.

After 2 days in DC I have to say the central city feels more alive and healthy than I’ve ever seen it. Things are clean, infrastructure looks good, public services are visible, and more people seem to be living downtown than ever, with newish apartment buildings all over the place.

I had a conversation last week with someone that went like this — “Do you live in the District?” “Haha, who would live in the District? Services in DC are terrible!” — and all I could think was “dude, are you serious?” Or maybe his definition of “adequate public services” is different from mine. Whatever. In any case, the city looks great to me, clean and well-run, friendly to visitors, with more places to go, things to see, restaurants to try in more parts of the central city than at any time in the last generation or so.

I stayed in a hotel carved out of the 1839 General Post Office building, ate excellent barbecue, had coffee in a neighborhood that 15 years ago I avoided walking through at night, played with a terrier in an adorable pea coat, and of course enjoyed use of the bicycles maintained as a community service.

Besides, DC has the third-awesomest American city emblem, after Chicago and LA.

Thanks to the BSD DC crew for hosting — I’ll be back again soon, I’m sure.

OK, maybe I shouldn’t hit “send” on this one, but, you know, you want the real me, here you go.

I’m not one of those people who typically has “action” dreams, with a complex plot that has a crisis and a resolution, and things exploding, and so forth. But every once in a while (usually on nights involving wine-induced acid indigestion, which is probably worth some experimenting for the sake of Science), I luck out. And last night was one of those nights.

When I woke up, I had the whole thing very clear in my mind. I deliberately chose not to run right to the kitchen table and pick up my pen and write it all down — because, in the end, who the hell cares if I get every single detail, I’m not making a screenplay out of this (or am I?) — but I can still remember the gist, which is the following:

I was in a very nice house (not Downton Abbey, but nice, you know, eight bedrooms, coordinated shutters in the windows, sort of a Frank Lloyd Wrighty thing) on a hill, with fairly spacious grounds that backed on a public garden overlooking the sea. There were a lot of cats. It was the Pacific, because we were near Fort Hood, which in this universe (dream!) was in northern California in the general area of Fort Bragg. It wasn’t my house, but my brother (who in real life is dead, but, you know, dream) was due back from London any minute.

But anyway, let me get to the part you’re interested in: some nefarious force (and remember, last night I wrote about Halting State) was after the people I was staying with. There was a fair amount of self-protective sneaking about, and then we were in the backyard (just above the garden) and the HOUSE BLEW UP. Specifically, the middle of the house exploded, blowing a hole in the roof. It was really frightening, and it was around this point that Ashton and I looked to one another for comfort.

Get your mind out of the gutter, it was a bro hug, everything was G-rated and suitable for All Audiences, but he was there and I was there and we were frightened and there’s nothing more comforting than another person. I recall him as being very nice.

Unusually for a dream, after the house exploded the dream continued to a full resolution, just like a movie, all the loose ends wrapped up; my brother arrived and took a nap; we drove into town to meet with the police; we found the porcelain bowl out in the garden, intact, but that’s a part of the story I don’t have time to go into. If you want the rest, read the screenplay.

In real life I have no interest in Ashton Kutcher; he’s not my type, I don’t want to embrace him. I’m not even sure he’d be very nice. But there you go. You do things in dreams you wouldn’t do in real life; that’s the whole point.

Like anyone who’s lived as long as I have, I have a lot of keys I don’t use every day. Some are obsolete and others are occasionally used; they all live in (ATTENTION ROBBERS: PLEASE DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER) the Italian porcelain lady-shaped and lady-intended-for storage object you see pictured below, which I bought at some antique market (probably in Ellicott City) at some point in the distant past and which sits behind my desk.

However, like you, I have my ring of everyday keys, which I work hard to keep to the absolute minimum, since they live in my pocket. And it occurs to me that what’s currently on it is the following:

• Two (2) keys to my apartment
• Two (2) keys to two different mailboxes
• One (1) bike room key
• Three (3) keys to three different bike locks
• One (1) Presta/Schrader bike tire adapter

That is, of the nine (9) items on my keyring, five (5) are bicycle-related! That’s either awesome or disturbing, depending on how I happen to feel about it at any given moment. As of this moment, we’ll call it awesome.

One of the things I learned last year when I lost about 30 pounds successfully through diet and exercise was non-intuitive, but important: there’s no point in punishing yourself in order to lose weight. That doesn’t mean you need to make long-term, significant nutritional changes that are often annoying and at times maddening. You do. But if you want to be able to sustain your changes, you need to keep things in perspective. So know your boundaries. Being respectful of how far you’re willing to go helps ensure that you don’t get discouraged for no good reason.

For me, two of the boundaries I live by are real sugar in my coffee and real butter on my toast. No exceptions. I’m sensitive to how much sugar and butter (and toast) I eat, and how often; but I don’t replace something I find delicious with something I find foul and unpleasant in order to save 10 or 20 calories. Even over a full year of perfect adherence to a no-butter, no-sugar regimen (no cheating, no exceptions), the most I could conceivably lose as a direct result of that year of torture is about 8 pounds. No thanks; I’ll lose my 8 pounds another way, like (say) biking, on average, 2 additional miles a day for a year. (Come to think of it, I’ll get on that right away; that’s just one extra round trip to the Upper West Side per week, which I should be able to handle without any serious disruption.)

Another of my rules: no diet soda. I make the occasional exception for a can of Diet Dr. Pepper, but on the whole, I find diet soda to have no point; it’s not delicious or refreshing, and it tastes like it was made in a chemistry set (which, essentially it was). So why not just drink some water (or plain soda) and bypass the whole issue of empty calories entirely?

The thing about both salad and soup is that they help you feel full faster, compared to other things you might eat instead. And if you attune yourself to this (rather than reflexively eating on and on even if you’re not hungry), you’ll end up consuming fewer calories. So I’m trying to keep both on hand — and enforce a new cultural norm in my house, so that I’m allowed to eat something different from what others are eating.

The Simpson family (excluding Lisa) may believe that you don’t win friends with salad, but if your goal is to lose weight, you could do worse than making it easier to get in the habit of healthier eating. This weekend I invested in some salad fixins, redeployed my wooden salad bowl for its original purpose (it had been doing a stint as a collector of computer adapters, cables, and dongles), and made a pledge to eat salad as a meal more often — at least as often as I can stand, and perhaps more often than that. If tonight’s salad was any indication (romaine, celery, red onion, garbanzo beans, a bit of parmesan, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper), this won’t be completely horrible.

And what better to eat with salad than homemade soup, which has the additional virtue of using up whatever odds and ends you have on hand. Right now on the stove I have a large pot of Impromptu Soup cooling, and it wasn’t hard to make. I sautéed some onions, garlic, and tarragon in a tiny bit of olive oil, deglazed with red wine and with a leftover roasted tomato, added a quart or two of water and the last of my Better than Bouillon stock concentrate, and brought it back to a boil. Then I threw in a large handful of barley, two large handfuls of lentils, the very end of a bag of mixed dried beans, a few ounces of leftover roast beef chopped up small, the last of the New Year’s Eve chicken pulled off the bone, and about 8 almost-rotten tomatoes that I’d tossed into the freezer months ago waiting for a soup. Salt and pepper, and that was it; just let that simmer for two or three hours and you have a rich, healthful, delicious thick soup, which will be even better on reheating.