LeBron to Sixers, Thoughts on Middle Age, Writing Advice, and The Odyssey

LeBron James to the 76ers, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Writing Advice from John McPhee. Matt Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Travis Scott, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron

This week, we’re looking at LeBron James to the Philadelphia 76ers, the idea of being middle aged, Anne’s review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and writing advice from John McPhee. 

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Stories Bill Read or Watched the Week of July 20, 2026

“LeBron picks 76ers as ‘Last Decision,’ to sign 2-year, $8M deal” by Dave McMenamin on ESPN

  • Click here for article. 
  • James is 41, born December 30th, 1984. 2003 was his first year in the league. This will be his 24th year in the league. 
  • “James, 41, is signing a two-year, $8 million contract with a player option, Klutch Sports Group CEO Rich Paul told ESPN’s Shams Charania. James made nearly $53 million with the Los Angeles Lakers last season.” -from the article 
  • This choice lifts LeBron a couple of notches for me. 
  • Why not LA for the veteran minimum? 
  • Were you thinking about maybe where before the deal? I was thinking maybe Cleveland because Mobley would be helpful on defense. Thought Golden State was fun. Would probably play the “3” in those scenarios which wasn’t good. 
  • The value of reflection. Season is over vs. right now? I have recharged for Watauga basketball now that we’re ending July. 
  • “Meanwhile, a trio of Sixers players — Tyrese Maxey, Joel Embiid and the newly acquired Jaylen Brown, another surprising addition for Philadelphia this offseason — worked on James directly, sources told ESPN. That effort was led by Maxey, a fellow Klutch client who has referred to James as a “big brother” in the past.”
  • Does this make Philly the favorite in the East? Knicks, Sixers, Celtics, Pistons, Raptors
  • I bet the Pacers +600 to make the Eastern Conference Finals. 

“When Middle Age Actually Starts” by Julie Beck from The Atlantic. 

  • Click here to connect to The Atlantic story. 
  • When does middle age start and end? I think I’d go 48-55, even though I’m expecting to get to 100. 
  • When does old age start? 
  • From the article: The average life expectancy in the United States is 79. So if you cut that in half, 39.5 is the precise statistical midpoint of the average American life. But that doesn’t reveal much—middle age isn’t just a point in time but a phase of life. How long does that phase last? When does it start? When does it end? How can you tell when you’re in it? These, it turns out, are very fraught questions.
  • I frequently say I’m old and I’m not kidding. 
  • From the article: I am 35. Is a 35-year-old middle-aged? If you ask my friends, they’d be quick to say I’m “still young,” but the word still carries a note of reassurance that I find troubling. Is a 66-year-old retiree middle-aged? Maybe, maybe not—but they sure don’t want to be called “old.” Is a 29-year-old middle aged? Surely not, yet The Wall Street Journal ran a story a couple of years ago about 20-somethings who claimed they felt middle-aged.
  • Crisis definitely popped into my thoughts. From the article: “The No. 1 word attached to midlife is crisis,” Chip Conley—the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, an organization that offers workshops for making the most of midlife, and the author of Learning to Love Midlife—told me. (This association persists despite evidence showing the midlife crisis is mostly a myth.)
  • From the article: Being middle-aged, to her, means truly being in the middle—having people both younger and older than you looking to you for help and guidance. That might mean you’re in the sandwich generation: caring for children and starting to support aging parents. Or it might mean you’re a leader in your workplace, mentoring younger colleagues and relied on by older ones.

“Draft NO. 4” by John McPhee

  • Originally published in The New Yorker, this is a piece about writing and the writing life. It includes the advice to write “Dear Mother” at the top of a piece and just use her as an audience to get the story or information out just as you’d tell her. 
  • There’s a book: Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. I downloaded the sample. Click here for book. (We are an Amazon Affiliate) 
  • He’s 95! That’s not middle aged! 
  • A paragraph from Wikipedia that I enjoyed: Reflecting his personal interests, McPhee’s subjects are highly eclectic. He has written pieces on lifting-body development (The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed), the psyche and experience of a nuclear physicist (The Curve of Binding Energy), a New Jersey wilderness area (The Pine Barrens), the United States Merchant Marine (Looking for a Ship), farmers’ markets (Giving Good Weight), the movement of coal across America (“Coal Train” in Uncommon Carriers), the shifting flow of the Mississippi River (“Atchafalaya” in The Control of Nature), geology (in several books), as well as a short book entirely about oranges. One of his most widely read books, Coming into the Country, is about the three faces of Alaska: the urban, the rural, and the Alaskan wilderness.
  • Advice from the McPhee piece: “Just stay at it; perseverance will change things.” “You’re so unhappy you sound authentic to me.” “You can’t make a fix unless you know what is broken.”
  • There’s a great story about an editor named Eleanor Gould who when she was 22 marked up a copy of an issue of The New Yorker and mailed it in. It doesn’t seem to be a true story but it had a funny ending of, “Hire the b—-!” 
  • One more thing on Gould from the piece: She doesn’t mind when friends call her the Pencil Lady. A blog she began on The New Yorker’s website, mostly about copyediting, evolved into the best-selling book Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Norton, 2015). Click here for the book. (we are an Amazon Affiliate) 

The Hawk, season 1 on Netflix starring Will Ferrell, Fortune Feimster, Molly Shannon and Luke Wilson. 

  • Izzy and I watched all 10 episodes. I don’t know that we’ve ever watched a whole season of a show together. 
  • Izzy’s observations about the humor of Anchorman relative to the humor of The Hawk. 
  • Gets 28% on the Tomatometer and 65% on the popcorn score. 
  • I wrote my first Rotten Tomatoes Review! 

Stories Anne Read or Watched the Week of July 20, 2026

“LeBron’s Final Decision Is a Massive Plot Twist for the NBA” by Michael Pina in The Ringer

  • LeBron’s Final Decision
  • Surprised? The other possibilities did not excite me (GS, Miami, Cavs) I think this is fun. I think Denver would have been cool and the Pacers, but don’t think he ever really considered those 2, especially not Pacers
  • Embiid is big question, along with depth. Also how will will big 4 get along? Embiid, LeBron, Maxey, Brown? 
  • Writer says East is better than past seasons.My personal thoughts are that the Knicks will not repeat but they will have a good season. Pacers will have a pretty good season, I think Detroit will drop, Heat will not be any good, Cavs will drop and the Raptors will drop. I guess I am not as high on all of these teams as the writer is. Raptors hinge on Kawhi and if he goes there and IF he stays healthy. I think 76ers have a great chance. 76ers/Knicks/Pacers. Celtics will be good but I think same as this season, they won’t do it in the playoffs.
  • Writer doesn’t think it will have a big impact, I am going to disagree. I guess it is if all things go, then it will. If Embiid never plays, Brown clashes with team, then it won’t.

“Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult” directed by Chris Smith

  • Bring Me the Beauties
  • Model from the 80s Hoyt Richards centers the episodes that delve into a cult he was a part of. Believed some of members were Aliens
  • Frederick von Mierer’s Eternal Values cult, recommended precious gems they would buy, inflated cost, supported by members, communal living, berated. 
  • Chris Smith also did Tiger King
  • Where is Hoyt Richards now? EW article by Britt Hayes

“The Odyssey” directed by Christopher Nolan 

  • On the plane home, I rewatched Interstellar for the first time since it was released. I understood more this time. A good movie with a great score (my fav) but still not high up there for me in my fav movies. Nolan movies in general I find interesting and all are a must watch, but have not really loved one. We will see soon if I love the Odyssey. (Obviously wrote this pre-watch)
  • I give it an A-, but not one of my fav movies ever or anything. The last 40 minutes or so were really good. Loved the score, visually a nice look. All the actors were good, none were best actor material IMO, but I can see Hathaway getting a nod, probably Damon too, but no “wow” performances. I would say one thing is sometimes I think the casting is too many stars? I do not understand casting director Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, my only thought is that the armor was doing the work and maybe that’s the point. Anti-war, treat your neighbors well.

“The Silence of the Girls” by Pat Barker

  • I read this book based on a search for historical fiction in TikTok. It is a women’s point of view of the Trojan War. A great perspective. A King’s wife gets taken as Achille’s woman after her town is sacked by the greeks, gets taken to sack Troy.

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Is the End of Reading Here? GenAI and the Reading Writing Classroom

“The End of Reading is Here” from The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch

  • Click here to link to the article in The Atlantic.
  • For Rose Horowitch’s profile page on X, click here.

Quotes from the article for discussion are bolded below and in quotes.

Click player above to listen to the “End of Reading” podcast episode

“…fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.”

This week my friend Dave Witzig texting me to ask what I’ve been reading…

Going to Huzzah Books in Boone to hear Zachary Vernon read from his book Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World

My wife and I are daily readers.

The resurgence of daughters, ages 18 and 20, reading.

I remember a faculty meeting around the year 2015 at St. John’s in Queens when I wondered aloud to my colleagues if reading was going to continue to be a primary way that people in their teens and 20’s learned. A few people thought it was a pretty funny joke. I wasn’t kidding.

“Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.”

Where do my kids get their news? I think exclusively from TikTok and Instagram.

The news sites I check out regularly…

  • ESPN, The New York Times, Fox News, The Atlantic
  • The challenge of figuring out news about the diarrhea lettuce.

“And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.”

What counts as reading? Does an audiobook count?

What counts as writing? The concepts we work with in composition applied to social media including YouTube.

Is counting overrated?

The stamina of attention span.

I use GenAI platforms. If you use them for everything, what might you miss?

  • Writing as a tool for knowing.
  • You still have to “know stuff” to use GenAI the same way you have to “know stuff” to use a Google or Library Database Search. For example, you might have to have read to know who Dean Oliver is as you pursue an effective way to use basketball analytics as a coach. Students might throw around the word “pedagogy” in a reflection because GenAI produced it for them. Students who copy and paste from GenAI don’t always see how their texts stand out in a negative way among all the other texts that students turn in.

“And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever.”

One of the things I like about books: a person has taken the time to pull the text together. For me, a book doesn’t diappear into the ether the way an article is more likely to. Of course, there are exceptions!

“Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year.”

  • I am least partially guilty while at the same time trying to draw the students I work with into reading.
  • Getting assigned 5 books in a week in graduate school (didn’t read it all) while at the same time showing up to a first class having read the whole text already.
  • Reading workshops. I’m doing my favorite thing right now except for that I’m doing it on my own.

The Last 5 Books I Read and Enjoyed:

  1. The Contemporary American Essay edited by Phillip Lopate
  2. Rapture by Nick Nurse with Michael Sokolove
  3. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (about David Foster Wallace) by D.T. Max
  4. Heartland (about Larry Bird at Indiana State) by Keith O’Brien
  5. True and False Magic by Phil Stutz. (Three constants: Pain, Uncertainty, and The Need for Constant Work)

Did I read or watch any other stories this week?

  1. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. She acts like a patient for med students.
  2. Domestic Gulags by Laura Kipnis. A huge list of stuff like this: You can’t be a slob. You can’t do less than 50 percent around the house, even if the other person wants to do 100 to 200 percent more housecleaning than you find necessary or even reasonable.
  3. Ann; Death and The Maiden by David Lazar. About an old relationship in which the former partner takes their life.
  4. The Hawk tv series on Netflix starring Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Luke Wilson. Crass and explicit. At times laugh out loud funny. Introduced me to Fortune Feimster who both of my kids new from social media.

Thanks for taking the time to visit Torg Stories!

From Los Angeles to Warsaw, Poland: Anne from the PURO Warszawa State Miasto

My sister Anne has travelled to Poland where she will see Bad Bunny in Warsaw and travel to Krakow and Prague. In preparation for this conversation, I read “Notes from Poland” by Kenneth Sherman.

Click on audio player above to listen to the “Anne in Poland” episode

Topics for discussion from “Void and Voice: Notes from Poland.” The article was written by Kenneth Sherman and published in Creative Nonfiction. Click here to access. I’m excited to look at the Creative Nonfiction archives!

The writer Kenneth Sherman goes back to Poland in a reverse trip from what his grandfather took 93 years before. I consider a trip to Norway to trace the places my own ancestors lived. Anne did one of those DNA tests and it reported we’re 25% Norwegian.

  • The idea of a pilgrimage. 

Some lines from the piece for a TRUE or FALSE Discussion:

  • A people’s grave, especially if it is ones own people, is a very special place in one’s psychic map. 
  • After a time, being a tourist becomes merely an exercise, an accumulating of numerous dates and sites. Mind travel is usually superior to the geographical kind. 
  • On the tombstones… They lean this way and that, like crooked teeth. 

Stuff I didn’t know before or stuff I thought more deeply about because of Sherman’s piece:

  1. Treblinka: Nazi extermination camp in Poland 
  2. The Polish people under the rule of Nazis. 
  3. Poland divided and disappears for over 100 years starting in the late 1700s. Anne, what do you know about Polish history? 

I looked into some other texts related to Bad Bunny and/or Poland: 

  1. The World’s Newest Superhero: Bad Bunny by Carina Chocano in GQ. Click here. 
  2. Unquiet Days at Home in Poland by Thomas R Swick. Click here for Amazon link. 
  3. Exit into History: A Journey Through New Eastern Europe. Click here for Amazon link. 
  4. Milk Bar article in the NY Times click here. 
  5. A sweet bun so good it inspired a national holiday. BBC. Click here. 
  • From the article: As the days grow warmer in Poland, our forests teem with beautiful fruits like strawberries and plums, which we will eagerly fold into light, delicious summer dishes. By far, the most anticipated seasonal crop is the bilberry, the blueberry’s smaller and tarter European cousin.
  1. The 2018 film Cold War directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Nominated for three Academy Awards and available to stream on Amazon. Click here to connect with film on Amazon. 

Some Bad Bunny tour dates: 

  • Stockholm Sweden last July 11th 
  • Warsaw Tues July 14th (the show Anne is going to)
  • Milan Italy July 17 and 18
  • Brussels, Belgium after that…

Anne’s list of content she read or watched related to her trip to Poland to see Bad Bunny.  (Add link when possible). 

  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/15/travel/dan-brown-the-secret-of-secrets-prague.html  Prague (also going to Czech Republic)
  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/01/travel/warsaw-nightlife-clubs-edm-djs.html I won’t go to clubs, but it’s an interesting read. The writer is stayed at the hotel I’m staying at. No photos!
  2. https://culture.pl/en/article/warsaw-everything-that-was examining the rebuild of the destroyed city and

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“Why We Travel” by Pico Iyer and Anne is Headed for Bad Bunny in Poland

If you travel, why do you go where you go? I’ll bet your reasons are different from Pico Iyer’s, as explained in his essay “Why We Travel.” We pick out some lines for discussion below as well as look toward Anne’s trip to Poland that will include attending a Bad Bunny concert in Warsaw.

“Why We Travel” is an essay by Pico Iyer published on Salon.com on March 18, 2000. Click here to read it. 

Before I read Iyer’s piece, I jotted down some thoughts I have on my own travel: 

  1. I don’t seem to be able to enjoy traveling without doing a research project first. From the Charlotte concert we went to (train, where to eat, stores to walk through) to walking around Savannah or going to Maui.
  2. Parts of my travel preparation: multiple books, lots of Google Earth scrolling, following social media accounts, and lots of Google Doc notes. 
  • Also: I’ve presented on multiple trips to the family and they’ve picked 
  • Also: I write out the directions for the bus before I travel to an away basketball contest 
  1. I’ve become more fearful / anxious. Maybe why? daughters and wife, getting older. 
  2. I have right next to zero travel abroad experience. 

If I could go anywhere this summer, where would I chose?

My daughter Izzy asked me if I could travel to any country, where would I go?

  • I said Switzerland, and here are the reasons I could think I would want to go to Switzerland:
  1. Wherever I’m going with my family, the connections formed doing something such as waiting to board the plane can’t be underrated. Speaks to that cliche, the journey not the destination. 
  2. I’ve seen the beauty in pictures or videos, and I’d like to walk within it all myself. 
  3. Experience a place different than I’ve been before. Look how it’s done here, whether that’s Queens, Winamac Indiana, Charleston, Miami, Phoenix, LA, Maui, or London. 

Here’s the opening paragraph of the essay. There’s a lot to discuss in it: 

  • We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again — to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. 

Some lines I chose from the essay to discuss: 

  1. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial are the things we imagine to be universal.
  2. Our only exchange like this is money? I find that I always take Michael Jordan posters to Kyoto, and bring woven ikebana baskets back to California; I invariably travel to Cuba with a suitcase piled high with bottles of Tylenol and bars of soap, and come back with one piled high with salsa tapes, and hopes, and letters to long-lost brothers.
  3. The idea of seeing with new eyes: By now all of us have heard (too often) the old Proust line about how the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new places but in seeing with new eyes.
  4. Anne, you probably don’t know what you will do? On the most basic level, when I’m in Thailand, though a teetotaler who usually goes to bed at 9 p.m., I stay up till dawn in the local bars; and in Tibet, though not a real Buddhist, I spend days on end in temples, listening to the chants of sutras. I go to Iceland to visit the lunar spaces within me, and, in the uncanny quietude and emptiness of that vast and treeless world, to tap parts of myself generally obscured by chatter and routine.
  5. Reminds me of Geoff Dyer bringing in Nietzsche on habits: This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear” — disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide.
  6. The metaphor that travel is a love story: All the great travel books are love stories, by some reckoning — from the Odyssey and the Aeneid to the Divine Comedy and the New Testament — and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.
  7. What do you call yourself? I am, in many ways, an increasingly typical specimen, if only because I was born, as the son of Indian parents, in England, moved to America at 7 and cannot really call myself an Indian, an American or an Englishman.
  8. What have you brought back from previous trips? The virtue of finding a gilded pavilion in Kyoto is that it allows you to take back a more lasting, private Golden Temple to your office in Rockefeller Center. (Torg remembers his French Broad Trip, the mushroom hunt with his father) 

What new reasons in this essay might there be to travel? 

  1. We travel, then, in part just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home.
  2. holidays help you appreciate your own home more
  3. All, in that sense, believed in “being moved” as one of the points of taking trips,
  4. So travel, at heart, is just a quick way to keeping our minds mobile and awake.

This piece of loaded with references to what other writers say. Sometimes it’s a quote and other times the author refers to just talking with someone. 

  • I counted 22 references to what other writers said.  In the piece. This sort of thing impresses me that the writer is familiar with all of those facets of the conversation within travel writing.

Anne, does reading this and discussing it change your thinking at all about your trip? 

Trump is the United State President. Does that impact how you think about your trip? 

  • I think those here for the World Cup are finding that we all aren’t Trump or Trump Disciplines. 

What’s your prep like for a trip like you are taking? Buying guidebooks? Working on notes? Working on an itinerary? 

Some notes on the author Pico Iyer: 

  • @PicoIyer on X. Click here for profile. 
  • From Wikipedia: English born in Oxford son of Indian parents, both academics, moved to California when father started teaching at Univ of California at Santa Barbara, studied English Lit at Magdalen College Oxford, taught writing at Harvard and then started writing at Time, has lived in Nara, Japan since 1992 and has a Japanese wife, I counted 18 books written on his Wikipedia page 

For today’s episode, I almost picked a chapter from this book: 

  • Michael Palin wrote a book called New Europe in which there is a chapter about him travelling to Poland. I almost bought it and had us read that. 

Thanks for taking time to visit Torg Stories!

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with Particular Reference to Doughnut Plant Doughnuts)

My sister Anne spells it donuts and I use doughnuts. We both went out and ate some for this post, and we had a good time discussing Geoff Dyer’s essay “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (with Particular Reference to Doughnut Plant Doughnuts” as the catalyst for this week’s conversion.

Click above to listen to our donut or doughnut themed podcast

Sometimes donuts are trash (sometimes I still eat them)

-Anne on her donut consumption

Torg got his doughnuts from Local Lion Doughnuts and Coffee in Boone, NC.

  • Local Lion Doughnuts and Coffee. 791 Blowing Rock Road. Boone, NC. 
  • I appreciated this about the owners of Local Lion from their website: Josiah was born and brewed in Boone NC . He met Meredith as she was serving coffee on Appstate Campus and they settled into this beautiful mountain town.  Together they founded Local Lion in Spring of 2012. Early mornings making scratchmade doughnuts and  fresh roasting coffee are an excellent way to serve community. We love being an integral part of the high country.

Los Angeles Doughnuts from Anne:

Dyer’s piece opens with Effra Road as the metaphorical (and literal for the the writer) roads we all have to travel. Here are the opening lines of the piece:

  • For many years I lived in various flats either on or just off Brixton Water Lane. So I was always walking, cycling, or taking a bus down Effra Road. How many times did I walk down Effra Road? How many hours did I spend walking down Effra Road? If I was going to Brixton Rec to play squash, or to Franco’s for a pizza or a cappuccino (this was before I acquired the refinement of taste in cappuccinos that, in the years since then, has invariably been a source of torment and frustration rather than enhanced satisfaction), or to the aptly named Effra to meet friends for drinks, or just to take the tube to some other part of London, I always had to trudge or cycle down Effra Road. Wherever I was going, the journey began and ended on Effra Road. One of the reasons I moved away from Brixton was that I could not face trudging, cycling, or taking the bus down Effra Road again.

Torg’s potential Effra Roads: 

  • Ditmars Blvd in Astoria, Queens, NYC. 
  • It was a half mile walk from my apartment near Astoria Park and the East River from the N and W stop of NYC subway. Didn’t live there long enough to get that tired of it. 
  • It did have Martha’s Country Bakery, which we have never forgotten. Click here. Cookies and cakes but I don’t remember doughnuts. 
  • Would I usually rather have a cookie than a doughnut? 
  • AND, Dewitt Barnett Road near Valle Crucis, NC. We’ve got this 10 minute very curvy drive almost every time we leave the house. 

Anne’s potential Effra Roads:

  • La Brea and Melrose. I start on these streets all the time, maybe throw Santa Monica Blvd. in there.
  • Great donut place in Brownsburg IN. Hilligoss Bakery
  • Also Long’s Bakery in Indianapolis, kind of by Speedway
  • In Brownsburg, I would often go to a great gas station right by work. Get a Diet Mt Dew from fountain (not frequently available elsewhere) and a cinnamon type cake donut. Best donuts I ever had from a gas station. Casey’s gas station, a chain. I do not see them out here.
  • In Indiana, I used to go most Sundays and read the Sunday paper at Einstein Bagels I think around 82nd street on the west side where I would hope they would have a chocolate chip cookie cake that was round, I forget the name, but loved that sometimes they would run out just like in the story. I would get it warmed up.

The Nietzsche “enduring habits” section: 

  • Nietzsche loved what he called “brief habits” but so hated “enduring habits” that he was grateful even to the bouts of sickness or misfortune that caused him to break free of the chains of enduring habit. (Though most intolerable of all, he went on, would be “a life entirely devoid of habits, a life that would demand perpetual improvisation. That would be my exile and my Siberia.”) Unlike Nietzsche, I succumb all too easily to enduring habits. Programmed by habit, I kept going to Patisserie Valerie until I met the woman who became my wife.

 I am challenged about my enduring habits: 

  • Morning coffee and yogurt with Megan, right to the desk to work, a feel of needing to be at the desk 
  • To what degree, if any, do these need to be broken? 

Reminds me of how I used to say instead of going on vacation there we should just move there for a while. That feels different now.

Anne’s LA Habits

  • Used to get a fountain drink most mornings from 7-eleven. Do not do that as much. Used to also get a bagel maybe once a week, also do not do now. Now I get to work, have a diet coke and a protein bar.
  • My morning routine for work is simple, wake up, shower, dry hair get ready/dressed, sit on couch for 10 minutes and browse internet, then leave around 6:55 am.
  • Weekend habit. Work out and hike on Sat and Sun, hoping always to be done by 10 am. Mostly Runyon, occasionally Griffith

Torg Golden Lines from the piece for brief discussion: 

  • Psychologically, the location of a place is not fixed. It is determined not by where it is but by how we get to it.
  • Funny!: I went back to Delectica the following day and ordered another cappuccino and a doughnut. The doughnut I ordered that day was a ring doughnut, and it was an amazing doughnut. This was a major turning point in my New York life. As such, it will feature prominently in my forthcoming book Great Pastries of the World: A Personal View.
  • Not what happened to us at Bruno’s Pizza in Logansport: It was still there and we ordered cappuccinos and croissants, and the croissant, while it was just about tolerable, was nowhere near as good as I remembered and the coffee was pretty terrible (too milky and the foam was all bubbly, and although it seemed okay at first, by the halfway stage I decided it was totally revolting).
  • The last sentence. As we keep this up Anne, I am seeing that writers often like to go long in the last or second to last sentence: It did not seem like that at all now; now it became a symbol of the healing potential of the doughnut, of a world community of doughnut lovers living in peace and harmony, bound together by the vision and ambition of a Czech immigrant who went to New York, opened his Doughnut Plant, and then forged a doughnut empire, extending from New York to Tokyo while regrettably bypassing London, where we still have to make do with croissants that are like stale buns so that at times the whole of London seems like nothing else so much as an interminable extension of Effra Road.

What does he mean “the human condition” in the title? 

Anne: My general notes on book. I hate becoming known at a place, even though I know I do become known, esp because I have weird orders (Quiznos which is now closed used to be this for me). Writer likes going to a place and being a regular.

Anne’s LA Move:

  • Opened up my life to a more city feel, a walking city feel, even though everyone says LA is not a walkable city. It is not for the expanse of the city, but it is very much walkable in certain neighborhoods.
  • I feel energy and happenings here much more, I feel more connected to people even though I myself am quite to myself.

We could order Doughnut Plant doughnuts shipped to us. Click here to check that out. 

Anne’s Fav Desserts:

  • Cake. No fruit type cake (like a little layer of jam, yuck) Best cakes are the basic cakes IMO. Vanilla/Vanilla. I prefer that over chocolate. Birthday cake flavor also great.
  • Warm cookies
  • A great donut 

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