& no sweets before bed

Around Christmastime, after months of adhering to a strict low-glycemic diet (I had been chastened by the results of my glucose tolerance test in September), I embarked on a bender of late-night ice cream eating (well, mostly frozen yogurt) that continued until this Monday. See, I had discovered that I could read and eat ice cream at the same time. It's more specific than that: I found that Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, a Boxing Day purchase, was particularly well complemented by Ben & Jerry's "Half Baked" frozen yogurt, due to the nature and timing of the rewards delivered by each. No longer really "experimenting," I continued to read the rest of Klosterman's oeuvre (except Downtown Owl) in this fashion, and then David Lee Roth's memoir Crazy From the Heat, before dropping the "reading" part of the equation. Stonyfield Farms' "Cookies n' Cream" was my constant companion throughout four seasons of Jeeves and Wooster. I knew I had hit bottom when I sat down to listen to Phish's famous 12/29/94 "David Bowie" with a quarter of a tub of Breyer's "Take Two," so when the midwife told Hilary to cool it on the pre-nocturnal treats, I felt that the message was also meant for me. According to Joyce, an inrush of simple carbohydrates shortly before sleep shapes and really kind of ruins in advance your whole next day's glycemic career.

So this is Day Four, and though I am at this moment tracing in thought the quickest path to what might in truth be called a frosty pint, I have been generally wowed by the difference in the overall depth and texture of my mental life. I want to shout it from the rooftops: consciousness lives again! Sitting in the balcony of Cumston Hall on Tuesday night, crying as the cast of The Comedy of Errors broke into a seemingly spontaneous rendition of "Wimoweh" during the curtain call, I felt that Shakespeare himself was by my side, marveling at the summer stock troupe who, four hundred years later, had recalled his artwork to life, set in motion all its vital parts, and in so doing lit up, at least once more before death, long dormant neural constellations of meaning in the skulls of all those present that night at the Theater at Monmouth.