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We returned home from a morning walk around the neighborhood to find a bag of tomatoes on the front porch. This disproves what I said last week about people having so much produce they can’t give it away — clearly, you can give it away, so long as you leave it on someone’s porch when they aren’t home.

I’m being facetious, of course. My neighbors grow several varieties we don’t, so I’ve been gratefully snacking on tomatoes all day. As a neighborly gesture, I brought them a sack of avacadoes from my Amazing Avacado Sculpture and learned that they’ve been admiring my avocado tree all summer. I had a vision of them sitting in the hot tub, staring up at the avocado tree, coveting my fruit so to speak.

I brought my other neighbors a similar sack of avacadoes and a fresh loaf of sesame-seed sourdough, as a thanks for the tomatoes they didn’t leave on my porch. (I really wish people would leave notes with gifts.)

Earlier this summer I set two strength-training goals for myself. I wanted to bench my body weight, and I wanted to do 10 bar-dips.

The bar-dip goal came and went months ago, just a few weeks after I began training. I briefly considered going for Larry Ellison’s record… but ultimately decided that 12-15 bar dips is all anyone really needs to be able to do.

The bench-press goal has been harder to meet. I’m no longer sure this is even a worthwhile goal — big muscles get in the way of drumming — so you can imagine how dumb I felt this morning when I pinned myself to the bench under 150 lbs of weight.

“One more rep,” I’d thought in a personal Unbreakable moment, “I can do one more!” Ooh, I was wrong. Shoulda had someone spot me.

The thing about my health club is that most of the patrons are a lot older than me. Minus the occasional high-school football player, I am generally the youngest person there, and one of a very small handful who ever uses the bench press. Therefore the room where the freeweights are located is seldom used except by people passing through to the weird contraptions beyond, like the “glute blaster” machine that I always think should be called “All Ass” — so I had a few minutes to contemplate my predicament while I waited for someone to help me.

I wasn’t embarrassed to be stuck. I wasn’t in pain. But I sure as hell couldn’t lift the bar off my chest. I couldn’t even relax my arms, because letting go of the bar would have allowed it to tip off to one side, setting off a chain reaction of weights flying and bar flipping that could have really hurt someone, e.g. me.

Presently someone entered the room. I called, “Excuse me, sir?” He looked around with some alarm; I think he hadn’t noticed me there. He rushed over to help, assuming I was panicked I guess. He grabbed the bar and, from a terribly awkward position — imbalanced, with no leverage — began lifting. I pushed as hard as I could. Between the two of us we barely managed to rack the bar. That was actually scarier than being pinned; if my Samaritan’s arms had given out, I’d have had no strength left to prevent the bar from crashing back down onto my chest.

Then the guy turned around and took off, either in a great rush to work his ass, or embarrassed for my sake. Probably the latter. I now wish I’d stopped him to thank him formally instead of letting that awkward moment stretch out. I also wish I’d had the foresight to suggest that he take some of the plates off the bar, rather than just trying to lift it.

(Epilogue: A few weeks later, I ran into the guy who had helped me, and thanked him. I was happy to hear he had not hurt himself. I suggested that we’d have been smarter to unload the bar rather than trying to lift it; now both of us will carry around that near-useless piece of information forever, on the extremely slim chance that either one of us is ever in a position to help someone, or be helped, out from under a barbell.)

I overindulged in guacamole a month ago. I now have an aversion to it, reinforced by that deep kinesthetic memory of gastrointestinal distress. But I still have an avocado tree in my yard, and it’s still producing, even though I haven’t been up in the tree in weeks. In retaliation it has taken to dropping half-pound bombs on the patio. We find exploded avocados around the yard daily — I’m afraid to sit under it, for fear of getting brained.

Today I relented. Up the ladder I went, with my custom avocado picker (a plastic coffee mug duct-taped to a 10'-long 1''x2''). I just took the fruit that was easy to see, and easy to reach — my wife stopped me after #13. I’d picked 10 lbs of avocados! The giant of the lot was nearly a pound by itself.

I guess this is typical of late summer and fall in this region. Most folks have so much produce, they can’t give it away.

It takes no spectacular power of reasoning to determine that what I wear is fascinating to approximately none of you. Nevertheless.

I went shopping the other day, to prepare for the occasion of a friend’s wedding. My friend had the good sense not to include me in the wedding party, perhaps because he’s seen what I look like in a tux. So while I was happy to avoid the tux-rental song and dance, I was left with a wardrobe somewhat inadequate for the ceremony and reception.

The men’s department at Macy’s is staffed, I was relieved to discover, with young women who are able to assemble shirts, ties, and trousers into ensembles that appeal, or at least don’t look ridiculous. Or at least don’t look as ridiculous as what I would have come up with. (There’s a line in This Is Spinal Tap that comes to mind: “such a fine line between clever and stupid.” I think this is more true of fashion than of heavy metal — but especially true of heavy metal fashion, now that I think about it.)

Here’s something that shocked me about buying a necktie: “Grateful Dead Neckwear” is apparently a respected brand-name!

Sure, I’m familiar with Jerry Garcia’s ties — those actually made sense; they were based on Garcia’s own original artwork.

In contrast, “Grateful Dead Neckwear” seems to be a cheap attempt to cash in on the band’s name to sell merchandise. The designs are wholly unrelated to the band or its members. The only connection is the following pap, a marketing blurb accompanying the ties: The Grateful Dead Neckwear collection originates from the rich body of music, iconography, and culture that has evolved during the extraordinary thirty year history of the band. In other words, basically anything related to anything from the past 30 years is fair game. Which is to say: the designs on these ties have as much to do with the Grateful Dead as does the shape of my left nipple, which has also evolved during the past 30 years. You might argue that my left nipple did not originate from music, iconography, or culture, but I’d respond that the designs on these ties didn’t either.

In related news, I was finally able to find a belt that didn’t have someone else’s name on it.

I’ve made hundreds of pizzas in the past five years, but out of all of those pies, only two had a sourdough crust. (Until today.)

Once, I found myself with some leftover sourdough starter, which I combined with the pile of flour and dough scraps on the counter, plus a dash of olive oil. I paid no attention, haphazardly mixing it into a medium-wet dough. It made the best thin pizza crust I’d ever had: crisp and chewy, not soggy or limp. Later I laboriously attempted to recreate this crust, and failed utterly, creating a disk of flaccid dough that refused to spring in the oven, resulting in an unpleasant cardboard-esque material.

So although my success rate with sourdough pizza dough was only 50%, I was inspired today to create a new pizza dough using my apple-sourdough starter. In baker’s percentages, I used 90% levain, 4% salt, and enough water to make a medium-wet dough.

I kneaded only enough to mix the ingredients. This approach is novel, and was suggested by Evan Shively in an interview in the SF Chronicle in 1999:
"Crunch and gluten are at cross- purposes," Shively says. The more you knead, the less crunchy and the more breadlike your crust will be.

The results were fantastic. The baked crust was thin and crisp without being too crunchy, chewy without being difficult, and it had a great flavor. As experiments go, it was remarkable. My single regret is that I only made enough dough for one meal. Well… one large meal.