What?

So they gave me an MRI.

Because they only wanted to zap my head, I only had to go in up to my elbows.

It wasn't bad, really. They played the Classic Rawk station from SiriusXM -- first song up, "Starship Trooper" by Yes, which kind of fit the sci-fi MRI feel. And I had a little mirror attached to my face that reflected toward my feet, so I could see the guy at the control panel. It gave me the illusion of looking straight ahead and to the outside, so it wasn't so much like being buried alive as it was like being in a rocket tube.

But I did think about a comic book I read in my misspent youth, an issue of World's Finest where Batman is buried alive. I knew if he was stuffed in an MRI machine he'd find a way out of that too.

The MRI was not the first stop in my journey, of course. You don't just show up at the radiologist and say, "I'm feeling a bit peakish, old boy; think you could slap me in your magnetic whatsis and give it a spin?" No, first you go to the GP, who sends you to the specialist, who sends you to get your head examined.

What? Why did this happen? Speak up, sonny!

One day I was sitting on the porch and I noticed that everything sounded a little weird -- tinny, actually. Human voices were sounding like robots. So either everyone on earth had been kidnapped and replaced by robot duplicates, or something was off with my hearing. I decided that I'd give y'all the benefit of the doubt and go to the doctor. I've had ear infections as an adult, and that nasty wax buildup isn't just for old-fashioned floors, and I had read that the tinny sound can be caused by such things. If something is blocking one ear, the sound is moving slower through the obstruction than it does through the clear ear, causing the sound effect.

Or, option B.

My wife, who thinks I don't listen well as it is, nudged me to get to the doctor, so I did. And he found nothing. He gave it the old college try, zapping my ear with water, but told me he didn't think it would help. Off to the ENT!

First at the ENT: Into the booth for a test.

The booth controls.

As I have never been on any kind of game show, I have not been in a soundproof booth since the standard hearing tests of childhood. But the hearing tests have not changed much. Press the button when you hear a beep. Repeat these words as I say them. Etc. Must be boring for the tester to have to run down the same litany all day, but I found everyone at the clinic cheerful and friendly. And the results showed that I had lost a bit of hearing range in one ear, not caused by obstruction. I asked the doctor running the test, what else could it be if not caused by obstruction? She told me that was an interesting question.

Every step of the way people asked me what I did for a living. Hearing loss at my age is often caused by exposure to loud noises, like sirens or heavy machinery or jet engines. I told them I was an editor and worked from home, and the the only loud noise I generally heard all day was baby dog Nipper threatening to tear the UPS man a new one. No one asked me if I had ever gone to see KISS (yes, once) or been to L'Amour in Brooklyn (yes, once). I would have thought those would be the first questions they'd ask. ("Have you ever seen a concert by KISS?" "Yes, many years ago." "Well, there's your problem.")

The hearing doc thought it could be a number of things, so I went sent home with several prescriptions: a blood test for Lyme disease (the second one I had this year), rheumatoid arthritis, and other diseases that can cause hearing loss; an MRI for my head to see if it held anything (hyuk hyuk); and prednisone. Apparently prednisone has been shown to be useful for idiopathic hearing loss, and as I'm the idiopath that had it, they gave me the pills.

I'd never had prednisone before, but people warned me about oral steroids. It was a ten-day series that started with a massive dose and trended down. So the morning after the visit to the ENT I took the massive dose, expecting to collapse and freak out. I felt fine. No problem. Until six hours later in the supermarket, when I had to clutch the cart to keep myself from collapsing on the floor. It's a nice clean supermarket, but still. People talk.

Mostly the drug made me jumpy and light-headed, but as the doses diminished so did the side-effects. Unfortunately, it didn't magically fix my hearing. So I waited for my next appointment with the ear doc, and in the meanwhile got the blood test and the MRI. And tried not to look online. Because if you look online, you find out that it could be something benign and rarely fatal but hard to treat, like acoustic neuroma. Or, you find out it could be a malign tumor that's fixin' to kill you.

Tomorrow: The test results arrive... or do they? And: Yogi! Batman escapes! Return to the soundproof room! Doctors' homework! Things that can happen to your ear! Driving under the influence! Kingsley Amis and James Bond! And more!

Ex-mas.

I was walking the dog again -- I know, right? And I'd just walked him the day before! -- when we passed the various piles of garbage set out for our indefatigable trash men. And yes, I said trash men, because I've never seen a woman on the truck, and I've never met a woman who really wanted that job. I'm sure there are some, but I await their arrival.

Anyway, it looks like lots of you were busy over the Labor Day weekend! Being nosy as I am about other people's trash, I had to give it a casual-not-so-casual once-over as I went by each house. Seems like a lot of folks were cleaning out the garage, or cellar, or even attic. And good for you!

But I was sad that Christmas had come to an end.

I've had the sad duty of turning Christmas decorations over to the garbageman many times. But it always comes at the start of or after the end of the Christmas season. Either something breaks during Advent or Christmas, or I find that something mysteriously got broken in the cellar or attic in the intervening year, or I manage to break it while putting it up. But for me to toss something after Labor Day weekend would indicate that I was cleaning out the cellar or attic on Labor Day weekend. Which would mean work. Puh. Leez.

The Santa above was outside the house of a family that is getting ready to move. They had already filled a dumpster. Santa seems to have been one of the last things to go. Oh, jolly old elf, how sorry the parting must be. I could not tell if he was broken, but from little I know of their circumstances I think they're downsizing -- empty nest and all. There may just have been no room for St. Nick in the new place. It's so sad.

Below, the snowman is utterly shamed, or miserable, or was just dumped here face-down. He, at least, was definitely damaged. This family recently got a second dog, and the ripped up leg of this stuffie snowman may have been a testament to how deep in the possessions one small dog is able to get.

I know I should not get sentimental about objects, but there's hardly any other reason to have such things as these. I do think it's less sad to see them tossed outside of the Christmas season than during it or directly afterward. When it comes during or after they look like an old retainer who's been tossed into the streets. Here they look like what they are -- damaged goods getting a long-deserved rest. C'est la vie, c'est la guerre.

Doomsday.

AIEEEEEE!!😱

I kid. It's been many a long year since I feared the first day of school, which is what we have today in the Hudson Valley. As I write this, it was twenty minutes ago I saw the high school bus go by. I think I've seen happier faces on the bus to Rikers.

I alluded to my own school experiences a little last week: the first day of school was usually fraught with both anxiety and excitement. New teacher(s)! New classmates! New subjects! New school supplies! All of these could make me happy or miserable in the months ahead.

To be honest, I was almost always more anxious than anything. I clearly remember my first day of kindergarten -- I had attended preschool, which was mostly a place to stick me while my parents worked, but then we moved and I had a year off. TV all day! Just me and Mom! Yeah, a fella could get used to this soft living. But the fateful day arrived, and I had to go to kindergarten. Not one kid who lived near me went to my public school. I was being thrown to the wolves. All I'd seen of the school to that point were those hulking, monstrous fifth graders sneering from the basketball court when Mom took me in to sign me up.

Many years later, I heard a woman say, "I didn't have a drink the day I started kindergarten, but I could have used one." And I thought, Yep.

Funny -- as it turned out I liked that school and made some friends I kept for decades.

Six years after that fateful first day I started intermediate school, and was so excited I thought I would explode. I was going to different classes all day like a grown-up! That was unbelievably thrilling, to have different classes and different teachers to break up the day. I did have some friends going to this school, so that would be excellent. I was so worked up that I memorized the Welcome! pamphlet, including the map and the location of all my classes. Sixth grade was going to be AWESOME.

Oh, no. No, it was not awesome.

The school was across town, near a very rough neighborhood. Beatings were distributed to the dumb middle-class kids pretty much as soon as we arrived and occasionally thereafter. We thought we could hold our own because of our occasional fistfights in elementary school, but these kids would keep coming at you and upping the stakes until you were bleeding, and they had no compunctions against sneak attacks. Smoking, alcohol, drugs, weaponry, and pubescent pregnancy were not the kinds of things that we had been led to expect by our school experiences prior to this.

Eventually we found the good teachers, and we survived, or most of us did. Some kids managed to get their parents to get them into private schools and out of that nightmare. The rest of us managed to learn something. No one I know died, at least not in the three years at that school.

High school sucked, but for mostly different reasons.

Thoughts of my own first school days are thus always colored with the many weird circumstances of attending public school in New York City. I don't miss it at all. I wouldn't go back for a million dollars.

📏📕📓📐📎📒📖📚🏆🏫

P.S.: I will say I was stunned to discover that kids in other places in America actually had lockers. In my junior high you couldn't even keep your gym shorts at school; the lock on your gym locker would be busted the next day. In my schools they didn't even bother assigning full-size lockers, as I see kids using in any TV show or book set in a junior or senior high. They knew everything would be raided and trashed the second the hallway was empty. My junior high had a row of lockers outside the principal's office and no one could use them, because the Future Inmates of America would bust them open. The administrators took off the locker doors. There was no point.

P.P.S.: Future Inmates of America gag stolen by me from Michael Fry. From his locker.

Pi r square, Oreo are round.

As I promised yesterday, we're reviewing another strange, mutant strain of Oreo cookie today. Last week's Rocky Road Trip came out all right, at least by my reckoning, but what the galloping gourmet is this?

In time for America's favorite pie season -- roughly June to Thanksgiving -- we have Apple Pie Oreos, courtesy of Nabisco and its parent company, Mondelēz. The Apple Pie Oreo has artificially flavored apple pie filling with a graham flavored cookie. The cookie is also presumably artificially flavored; it does not actually taste like health-promoting minister Sylvester Graham, who was too busy spinning in his grave to comment.

Has Oreo finally gone a bridge too far with this one? The defining characteristics of the Oreo are the chocolate cookie and the vanilla-ish cream filling. Other Oreos of various incarnations generally have chocolate or vanilla in there somewhere -- chocolate cookie, chocolate filling, vanilla cookie, or vanilla filling -- but I think this may be the first I've tried that completely eschews both vanilla and chocolate. The question then is, is this really an Oreo?

Think about it: If it was a peanut-butter flavored cookie with peanut butter filling, and round, it could call itself an Oreo but we would know it was really just a round Nutter Butter. If it were an open-faced Oreo with a blob of marshmallow covered in fudge it would not be an Oreo, it would be a Mallomar. And yet this, and the Blueberry Pie Oreo, and the Strawberry Shortcake Oreo, and the possible-grounds-for-investigation-by-child-services-breakfast-police Waffles & Syrup Oreo, all pass for Oreos. Shouldn't Nabisco just have introduced these insane products as new cookies?

I'm sure there are sound marketing reasons for it -- shelf space, brand recognition, whatever. Slap "Oreo" on it and you don't even have to advertise; people will be looking in the Oreo section of the cookie aisle and wham! Red Velvet Oreos! But how far away from the original Oreo can you get and still be an Oreo?

Who knows? It's like one of those how-many-licks on the Tootsie Pop conundrums. The world may never know.

I brought this package to an informal meeting that was attended by a dozen people. I had one cookie before the meeting started. It tasted like apple pie. The graham cookie was less convincing, but definitely had hints of graham cracker, enough to make me think: Who uses a graham cracker crust for apple pie? No one.

At the end of the meeting I went to see if I could snag another and they were gone. This was not the only snack on the table, but it was the only one that had been consumed. These Oreos had been scoffed down with alacrity. The package was in the trash.

If we're going to keep behaving like that, Nabisco has every motivation to keep cranking the wacky Oreo flavors out. Look for New York Cheesecake Oreos, Saltwater Taffy Oreos, Alabama Slammer Oreos, Circus Peanut Oreos, Pizza Oreos, Hot Pockets Oreos (and Oreo Hot Pockets), Pop-Tart Oreos (and Oreo Pop-Tarts -- oops, too late), Green Bean Casserole Oreos, BBQ Oreos, and White Castle Oreos. There's no stopping them now.

Religion of food.

Yesterday I ranted about the evangelization of weight loss as a means for achieving weight loss, and I haven't changed my mind in the last 24 hours. Everyone I know who loses weight goes back to the old set point or worse when they go off the diet, and they all go off the diet. I don't know if it's biology or psychology or some combination, but that's what happens. Good grief, haven't we watched Oprah struggle with this long enough to know? And yet Oprah would seem to have the one attribute I identified that makes it possible for an overweight person to achieve a continuous healthy weight, in that she always promoted weight loss and healthy eating. But then, she didn't have a particular plan of her own to tout in those days, and perhaps that made the difference.

Anyway, she may be largely to blame for the way diet books are written now, and as an editor I have to read a bunch of them. I can't stand modern diet books, especially ones that go into some weird kind of spiritual aspect to food. Let me explain.

My problem is not that the struggle against weight can lead you to religion -- faith can be crucial for for many people to get control of unhealthy behavior. Overeaters Anonymous, for example, like Alcoholics Anonymous, is essentially a higher-power-based program, although very open to interpretation and even agnosticism. I have no problem with any of that. But that's not what's being pushed by modern diet writers. The problem is not that they bring food is brought into the spiritual realm -- hey, we Catholics call that the Eucharist. It's that to them food is the spiritual realm.

I don't want to name names or point to particular books, as I would like to continue to work, so please accept that these are generalizations. You could easily find examples at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookseller. They're the books that like to use terms like soulful and spiritual and zen and clean in books that are essentially about how to force down kale.

But there are some not-so-spiritual aspects to the books I've seen.

They claim to not be into shaming, but they are so very much into shaming. Shamey shamey shamey. They will explain that everything bad that happens to you -- everything -- can be blamed on the fact that you eat like a pig. Bad relationships? Bad diet. Depressed? Bad diet. Lack of control over your life? Bad diet. Bad career? Who'd hire you, fatso? Even genetic diseases won't get you a pass. You know why you got multiple sclerosis, Huntington's, sickle cell anemia? Our foodies are happy to tell you that you may have inherited your genes from Mom or Dad, but your Pop-Tart sucking ways activated the genes. There is nothing that cannot be blamed on your bad diet, and nothing that cannot be saved by this better diet.

And guess what? Not only will your body be healed of all that inflammation -- we're all so full of inflammation it's a wonder we don't burst into flame -- but your very soul shall be nourished. Isn't that great? You thought a religious experience might involve long journeys, church attendance, study of philosophy and theology, meditation and prayer, but it turns out you just needed to eat this organic broccoli rabe taco.

On a more prosaic concern, the words that these writers try to conjure with are fingernails on the blackboard to me. It's not their fault that "nourish" is as ugly a word as "moist," but its sprinkled like Himalayan salt all over the place. Nourish your soul -- bleah. My soul just puked.

Other words they love to throw around include transform (because "lose your cheese butt" is pedestrian), sultry, and sexy. They throw in sex a lot more than you might think a book about food would. But every time I see sexy, I think of Phil Hartman as the editor of Sassy. Everyone should.

And let me just say, the terminology of foodism does its proponents no favors. "Larb" may sound find in Laos, but in English it's the sound you make just before you throw up. Other terms like "evoo" (thanks, Rachel Ray) are just baby talk, and perhaps you know how I feel about that. "Forbidden rice" is cultural chauvinism, making China sound mystic and dreadful ("forbidden" rice is black, is a genetic outlier, and so is expensive; "expensive rice" wouldn't attract the rubes). Vegans love lentils, and "beluga lentils" look like caviar -- so let's name them after meat! "Seitan" is likely a phony foreignism from Hippieville c. 1968, a fake term for fake meat that sounds like that which must get behind me.

And why, if it's so important that we eat local, are we all supposed to get our salt from the Himalayas? This ain't Nepal.

I think I might even be talked into vegetarianism if these people weren't so annoying. But not veganism; you'll get my ice cream from me when you pry it from my very cold, dead fingers.

Now, that may sound like I also have some food issues, and I'll agree that I use it for comfort -- but I don't expect it to solve my problems beyond a moment's enjoyment. Besides, I know I have a problem. The only problem they'd consider is that the books aren't selling and Dr. Oz hasn't returned their calls.

What it comes down to is, these writers are putting way more on food than food can handle, because it suits their purposes. I say, if you need particular foods to nourish (ugh) your soul, your soul is going to be in big trouble when real trouble hits. War, famine, accident, or just illness -- and illness will hit, because you're not getting out of here alive -- any of these could disrupt the ability to eat this soul-nourishing food. At some point you won't get to eat your organic beluga lentil and forbidden rice salad; will your soul just wither within you? Food does not make for a very good religion.

Of course, you could snipe back that food will get you through times of no faith better than faith will get you through times of no food. Could be -- but that just demonstrates that food and faith are poles apart.

That's enough on health food. Come back tomorrow for another Oreo review!

Fred's Amazing Weight-Loss Secret!

Yes, friends, I'm happy to unveil my amazing weight-loss secret today! And the starting price for you is... absolutely nothing!

"But Fred," you say, totally gobsmacked by this news (and if you are not, please step away, smack your gob, and return when it is truly smacked). "How can this be?" you say. "The starting price is nothing? The secret is amazing? And aren't you kinda... fat?"

Well, the answer to your questions are: Yes, yes, and I prefer to other nomenclature. Some might say "fat," while I might say "husky." Some might say "morbidly obese," while I might say "cheerfully obese." Attitude counts for so much.

I do a lot of book editing, as many of you know, and I've done my share of diet books. Many do not call themselves diet books -- these days they promote "health" and "well-being" but if they didn't have at least a tacit promise to show you how to discard the lard they would never get printed. So let's call them diet books and be done with it.

I happen to believe they all work. Yes, every single one of them. And that is part of the secret.

I've known plenty of people, men and women, who have gone on diets at various ages and lost a pile of weight. All sorts of diets, too: meal replacements, paleo, Atkins, vegan plans, Weight Watchers, calorie counting, sugar-busting, the pizza diet, the cabbage soup diet, you name it. They worked just as advertised. (Please note that in this essay I am not referring to people with serious medical issues like diabetes and cardiac disease who lost weight when they had the fear of actual death put into them, or those who had inadvertent weight loss from cancer or its treatment -- although most of them put weight back on.)

All these folks had to go buy new pants. Everyone looked great. And then they all ballooned back up, usually worse than before. Most of the time this happened very quickly, sometimes in response to a life event, because we can't completely change our thinking and our body fights us hard to regain that weight. I never saw a fat person become a skinny person and stay that way.

EXCEPT....

Here comes the secret!

The secret is to evangelize the weight loss. The people who remain successful are those who do not just lose weight and keep it to themselves; they try to spread the word and get other people excited about it. In other words, they have a sense of mission and purpose and meaning connected to the weight loss that keeps them focused on continuing the accomplishment. And for many people this means they must become pains in the butt.

Vegans who lose weight from cutting the cheese (heh) and other fatty animal-based foods out of their diets are famous for being annoying to those who consume meat-based products.

As an ethical choice, they are compelled not to be quiet, I guess, anymore than a pro-life Catholic cannot remain silent about the issue of abortion (which comes up a lot less frequently than "What's for lunch?"). So they have a sense of mission built in. Weight Watchers has groups where people who work for the program hold meetings in which they help others and the others can help one another. Overeaters Anonymous uses a modified version of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, the last step being "Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to compulsive overeaters and to practice these principles in all our affairs." All 12-step groups caution members that to keep the gift of freedom from addiction they have to give that gift away. AA will tell you that you can't expect to stay sober in a vacuum, and they have plenty of stories of what happens to those who try.

I think we need to take this sense of mission into account when we look at successful dieting. Unfortunately I don't think this secret is good news for any of us. Why? Three reasons:

1) Most of us who wish to lose weight would really like to not make a big deal of it. We'd just like to do it and feel better and look better and not annoy other people. We hate being lectured and we don't want to become lecturers. So the idea that we have to hector our loved ones at Thanksgiving repels us as much as pumpkin pie attracts us.

2) The favorite way to evangelize weight loss, especially for Coachella types, is to write books and annoy everybody (especially the lardo who has to copyedit their books). They have to fight their way onto The Doctors so they can smile at and belittle fat people on TV. They say they want to help others, but they really want to be rich and famous. The secret is that deep down they're afraid of blubbering up again, and they know that being rich and famous for a weight loss plan will keep them honest. So yeah, they kind of really do want to help people, and that's the secret. But there's only room for so many diet books and diet plans out there; even if they get published the odds are a bazillion to one that they'll make it big. The vast majority of people who follow the diet plan will fail -- why should they evangelize someone else's plan? -- and go on to something else; the TV appearances will stop and the book will go out of print. Can they stay thin in obscurity? All us other losers can't, apparently.

Which brings us to:

3) Even if you know the secret it is no guarantee to continued healthy weight.

So my secret isn't much of a secret. I think that looking this over, Overeaters Anonymous is probably the best way to lose weight and keep it off (OA also deals with other food problems like anorexia, binge eating, and bulimia -- it saves lives). The problem with that is the person who can't lose weight would have to admit to being "powerless over food," and that is not the kind of thing someone who just wants to drop 30 for her high school reunion is prepared to do. Hell, most people who drive cars into trees, get fired for drunkenness, give their bartenders more money than their mortgage company, and have more outstanding warrants than actual friends can't admit they've become powerless over alcohol.

So there's my secret, and it's no help. Come back tomorrow when I explain why health food pushers are awful.

Drive on the driveway.

Yesterday our long national nightmare finally came to an end. Yes, I was able to drive my car on the driveway. What a relief.

Last winter really killed the driveway, and it wasn't so great before that. Last fall I realized I had waited too long to have it sealed -- they say every other year is good, and it was on year three -- and the winter before that had taken a toll. But by the time I called around it was too late and too cold and raining a lot. So, my poor unsealed driveway got pounded by the blizzards in March, and looked like hell.

I've waited since May for the guys I contracted to do the job to do the job, but they finally did it last week. It cost me. Large chunks had to be cut out and replaced with fresh asphalt. Money evaporated.

When the job was complete, we were told not to drive on it for days, and not to walk on it that night. Of course it's hard to get that across to the dogs. I kept little dog Nipper on a leash, but big dog Tralfaz? He didn't care that the place smelled like an airport. He's used to walking on the driveway to get to the far lawn for his business, and no amount of panicked instruction to the contrary from his nominal master was going to stop him.

I was sure he would track tar into the house, and leave permanent paw prints all over the driveway. My wife heard my moans, and, sympathetic soul that she is, sent me this text:

Fortunately it had dried enough so he didn't stick to the tar, nor the tar to him. No footprints were visible in the morning.

Normally you can drive on a resealed surface after a day or two, but since there was new asphalt and it had to adhere to the old stuff, I had to park out front for almost a week. It's not a big deal, except that Nipper likes to bark when he sees anything unusual outside the front window, like, oh, I don't know, a car parked on the street. Took him a few days to get used to the sight. And I worried because we're on a long stretch with no traffic lights or signs, and at night people like to drive way too fast along here, throwing their banana peels higgledy-piggledy. I expected to be awakened by some idiot conjoining his car to my parked vehicle in the middle of the night, but that didn't happen.

I never worried about this stuff when I lived in the city and parked on the street all the time. The suburbs have spoiled me.

But no crises, the job is done, the check cleared, and now I don't have to worry about the driveway until 2020. What a relief.

Now, about that roof....