Zen and the Art of Chevy Cavalier Maintenance.

My wife has a 2003 Chevy Cavalier that her parents gave her, so now, I have a 2003 Chevy Cavalier, too. On our first date, I got my first glimpse of it: cobalt blue with its fading and cracked University of Georgia super G plastered to its rear window. I thought then that she needed a new car, and that was four years ago.

The amazing thing is, aside from some cosmetic damage, there is nothing wrong with the car. Sure, it sounds like a broken hairdryer, the driver's sun visor gave up and is now lying on the passenger side floor, and the dash has a fist-sized hole in it from where a shady Jersey City mechanic did a curbside speedometer repair -- but there's something endearing about the Blue Bastard. Maybe it's the memory of my wife -- then my girlfriend -- pulling up to my Montclair apartment listening to the first mix tape I made her.

Now that I'm her husband, I feel like it has fallen to me to do husbandly things, like keep the damn thing running. This is no hardship. I enjoy working on cars, though I'm only slightly north of inept when it comes to auto repair. The Blue Bastard has had its way with me. Twice.

There's a keloid across the back of my right hand from the passenger side brake caliper. One of the bolts holding it in place would not budge. With all of my weight bearing down on the allen wrench, it popped out of its socket, and the back of my hand scraped across the caliper, taking a good chunk of flesh with it.

Most recently, the oil drain plug got the better of me. Since I began doing basic car maintenance, I've only owned Japanese vehicles. Working on an American car, I assumed the drain plug would be a standard size. Wrong. I stripped the 13 mm bolt down to about 12 mm before giving up and realizing the error of my ways hours later. Forty dollars later for a set of bolt extractors and a new drain plug, the lesson has been learned. (Never use a crescent wrench for anything on an automobile. And never assume anything, no matter how logical.)

By its very definition, maintaining my wife's Chevy Cavalier is a labor of love. It gives me great satisfaction to do these small things, personally, to keep her moving and keep her safe. And I appreciate her patience when I say I'm going to attempt a repair, and the job comes in late and over budget.

Eventually, the Blue Bastard will give up the ghost. My wife will get the hybrid she wants and my Chevy maintenance days will be over. Though I will be released from my Cavalier custodial duties, I will relinquish them with a heavy heart.

Plus, there's no way I'll be getting near the inner workings of any hybrid. Electricity terrifies me.

Writing in a state of emergency.

I’ve spent many weary mornings, just like this one, in hotels -- worn-out, broken-down, bleary-eyed. But the haggardness becomes a layer of armor, all because the newspaper got out.

I feel a certain solidarity with those who have to go to work, no matter the situation: soldiers and sailors, police, firefighters, nurses. Their callings are much higher than mine, but it steels me thinking that as they advance into whatever Mother Nature throws at them, I advance, even if it’s in their traces.

Hurricane Sandy, Hurricane Irene, and various snowstorms before the Weather Channel got desperate enough to start naming them: I’ve worked through them all. And despite the loss of sleep and sanity, it was an honor to play my small part in all of them. This weekend’s blizzard was no exception.

I’ve been a newspaper editor now for six, going on seven years. Saying that it hasn’t been easy is an understatement. But the reward has been invaluable. 

Pressure is the driving force behind journalism. To be effective in this line of work is to know and embrace pressure -- pressure of the deadline, pressure of the editor, pressure of angry sources and pressure of forces beyond your control, like Mother Nature. From my experience, pressure produces the best work. 

The best stories are the ones crafted under pressure, without time to overthink. The best paper I’ve ever been a part of producing was created from absolute scratch in a hotel conference room with spotty internet service. The best teamwork I’ve ever seen in a news organization came when the lights were out, cell service was limited, and floodwater was rising.

Pressure and the outstanding work it produces have been the rewards of my six years as a newspaper editor. I love it, though it doesn’t love me back. I need it, though it would crush me without a second thought if I let it. I embrace it, and watch the outstanding teamwork it produces. You should embrace it, too.

Jiu Jitsu at dawn.

I own mornings. I wake up most of the time somewhere between 5 and 5:30 a.m. This time of the year, in this part of the country, it might as well still be night. There’s something ominous about the black winter mornings of the northeast, the wind whipping and bending the wire window screens, hissing across the snow, sometimes cold enough to yank the breath right out of your chest. It makes it hard to leave my bed – and that’s exactly why I do it.

I get up, click on the electric kettle and wait for its hiss to drown out the wind. Coffee time. The beans are ground. The Aeropress is primed and plunged, and just like that, the ugliness of another winter morning is swept away before dawn breaks. I drink my coffee, write in my five-minute journal, and then do no greater and no fewer than two pages of free writing on whatever topic comes to mind.

Always two pages. Always in a black Moleskine ruled notebook. Always with a Tactile Turn Shaker aluminum pen which always has a pilot G-2 extra fine cartridge inside. The ink is always black.

Then the real fun begins. My workout always has to be done before the sun is up.

If I haven’t written this on this blog before, then here it is: The two words I avoid most are always and never. I just used the word always eight times.

My entire life, I’ve put a high value on consistency. It’s mostly because I’m not that great at anything, athletic or otherwise. But I found out early that I could beat pretty much anybody at being consistent. Being consistent is one of the highest standards to which I can hold myself. So I do it. Consistently.

This is the time of year when consistency’s mortality rate is highest. The cold weeks following New Year’s are when good intentions freeze to death. What keeps my feet moving is owning the morning -- every morning, but especially Wednesdays.

Wednesday mornings are for Jiu Jitsu at dawn. The class starts at 7 a.m., which this Wednesday will be about twenty minutes before sunrise. I’m usually the lowest man on the totem pole on Wednesday mornings, so the bone crushing begins immediately and doesn’t let up for the full hour.

Before the academy windows fog over, between those early drills, I’ll catch the sun rising out of the corner of my eye. The dreaming suburb begins to stir. Eventually, daylight hits the window, overpowering the academy’s fluorescents. On clear mornings, orange dawn spills across the blue mats. I smile at this and work my game that much harder.

Searching for Major Tom.

I must have been five or six. The airy acoustic guitar faded in, barely audible over the hum and whir of the straight six-cylinder engine, the whine of the transmission, the rumble of the all-terrain tires. I was sitting in the front seat, and WNEW was on the stereo of my mother’s Jeep Grand Cherokee. The radio dial might have been frozen in that position for all I knew.

Suddenly, a haunting voice trickled in above the faint strumming of the guitar.

“Ground control to Major Tom. Ground control to Major Tom. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on.”

I took off with Major Tom – clapped my helmet onto my head, rocketed through the space of wild imagination. In my childhood mind, I couldn’t wrap my head around the horror that befell him.

The dead circuit. The dead astronaut adrift in the tin can. The poor wife.

It might have been my first awareness of mortality. I was terrified. The allure of the song and the story were so strong, so beautiful, and so terrible. My circuits weren’t dead, but at five years old, they were overloaded. I cried, but I wanted to hear the song again.

Except I didn’t know the name, or the artist. I refused to ask my mother. I had to find drifting Major Tom myself. So I searched for years.

The search led me down strange musical trails. The lengthiest was probably REM. For some reason, I believed what I’d heard was an REM song, but every album proved to be a dead end. No astronaut lost in space.

Every now and then I would catch a glimpse of Major Tom spiraling out through the galaxy as I surfed the radio dial, the final notes of his funeral dirge stretching along the neck of an electric guitar. They spun and wound out until they were sucked into a sonic black hole.

Then, I found him. Thankfully, some similarly ignorant Napster user, didn’t know the name of the song was “Space Oddity.” A search for “Major Tom” and a two-hour wait for the download yielded a tinny, overly compressed rendition. But I had found him. And I had found David Bowie.

It doesn’t feel that long ago, and that makes it that much harder to say goodbye to the Starman, Ziggy, The Thin White Duke and all of the other people David Bowie was. He had his finger planted firmly on the pulse of the weird blood that runs through all of our veins, fueling our wildest visions of the future and our strangest dreams. For this reason, and many others, I’m grateful to the man who sent me to space.

A skeptic's guide to New Year's resolutions.

Happy new year. As much as I loathe to write it, this is a post about resolutions. You're probably thinking, loathe is a strong word. Here's why I chose it.

I don't believe a new calendar hanging on your wall is the best reason to resolve to change. I think the best time to initiate change is right now. Or, more accurately, the best time to change was yesterday.

However, after spending time with Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations," I've come to appreciate that the nature of the universe is change. It's a constant. And to stand in the way of change -- particularly any reason at all to change for the better -- is to get crushed under the weight of the universe.

For the reason at the beginning of the previous paragraph, I've never had a new year's resolution, and I think that has been to my detriment. This year, I have nine. These are the big four:

1. Be more useful to others.
2. Blog three times per month.
3. Mediate for at least five minutes, three times per week.
4. Read a book per month.

You'll notice a common thread with three of four: they're measurable. I'm using Way of Life, a fantastic habit building and breaking app I heard about on a recent episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, to track my progress. Four days into the new year, all systems are go. Keeping things measurable has been critical. Here's why.

Before broadening my fitness horizons, I was a gym rat who dreaded the first week of January. I didn't dread it because the gym was crowded, or because the new members didn't know what they were doing, but more so, it was because the majority would be gone by the next week.

What was especially frustrating and depressing was that with a slight adjustment to their approach, I knew their new habit would stick. Here is an example of an adjustment I made to one of my other resolutions. Italic type is the rough draft. Bold type is the final cut. 

• Get better at Jiu Jitsu and earn my blue belt.
• Train Jiu Jitsu at least three times per week.

First, the obvious: one is measurable, the other isn't. Second, not so obvious. Let's look at the philosophy in the rough draft. It's goal-oriented. I'm a goal-oriented person (it's something I'm trying to change, but that's a post for another day). But getting to blue belt, or any belt -- or really, any arbitrary milestone in life -- has a way of leading to shortcuts and a loss of appreciation for the journey.

It also sets you up for total derailment if you hit a setback. What if I trained every day and didn't get the promotion? I'm more likely to give up on the resolution, or maybe on Jiu Jitsu.

By resolving to train three times a week, I'm better positioning myself for success for three reasons:

1. I can measure my progress.
2. I'm likely to better appreciate the journey.
3. I'm likely to absorb more Jiu Jitsu because I'm grounded in the present, not looking ahead toward a milestone.

Back to the gym example. Instead of resolving to lose 15 pounds (measurable, but not unlike my blue belt example) or resolving to get fit (kind of like resolving to get better at Jiu Jitsu), I'd advocate for resolving to exercise three times a week. Tying exercise to a place -- the gym -- adds another point of failure to the fitness equation. Besides, you can get better exercise for free all over the internet. I'd recommend getting yourself a light kettlebell and checking out Fitness Blender.

This concept doesn't just apply to fitness. The same is true of my mediation resolution. The bar is set low: only five minutes, only three times a week. That's intentional. I've made the onset of forming the habit as easy and accessible as possible. I know I can manage five minutes, and that makes me optimistic that I'll work up to longer sessions at greater frequency.

Of my big-four resolutions, the first -- be more useful to others -- is neither specific nor quantifiable. That makes it difficult to sustain. However, it's supported by the next three -- chiefly, blogging three times per month. It's my hope to make this blog more useful to you in 2016. My deepest thanks to you for reading.