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next low-key whoop-de-doo. There have been certain doughy accumulations. Furthermore, one day not so long ago my brother the logger and I were comparing our accumulated clicks, twinges, and impingements and it struck me that apart from the fact that I have never been hit in the head with the butt end of a tree, he’s no more physically frayed from his certifiably dangerous profession than I am from all my long-term butt parking.
    Then the sitting studies started rolling in. Now, I’m a skeptic when it comes to popular medical news, since mostly what you get is the most superficial skimming of the most shocking scintillas, followed in five years by an utter reversal, and we all get nutritional whiplash as we trade out our low-fat margarine forstone-ground nut butters. I figure you get your genetics, you do basic due diligence, and then maybe you can tweak the remaining ten percent of fate. But these sitting studies made it sound like I might as well work in a burning tobacco factory as sit on my hinder from dusk to dawn, and—and this was the worst part—those intermittent jogs I was taking weren’t enough to undo the sedentary bulk of the rest of the day.
    And so I began to take preventive measures. First I tried sitting on a big red yoga ball. It was fine I suppose, but one day I got to bouncing on it as a form of procrastination and wound up knocking the computer monitor off the desk and injuring it well beyond the terms of the warranty. Next I tried a standing desk, but this only led to me slouching and slumping and leaning on my elbows the same as before only now while standing on my two flat feet. It was a minimal improvement at best.
    Then my wife suggested I get a treadmill desk. I chuckled condescendingly, as she is ten years younger than me and thus surely lacks my capacity for skepticism, and never mind if she is really into high-level black-belt yoga and can do things like ski to the back forty and back, whereas I … I … aaand so I got a treadmill desk.
    Do you know how hard it is to type treadmill desk ? Of all the trend-chasing, fad-following silliness I’ve gotten myself involved in over time, this ranks right up there with parachute pants and jelly bracelets at the roller rink. Nothing like walking all day and getting nowhere. It’s bad enough when the guys down to the feed mill ask me what I’ve been up to lately and I say, “Crafting precious metaphors.” Now I have to say, “Crafting precious metaphors while walking 2.2 miles an hour—in place.”
    But you know what? Two months in I’ve dropped about fifteen pounds. Certain hitches in my giddyup remain, but I feel more spry in general. My record is eleven miles in one day, although it’s usually more in the four-to six-mile range. I’ll leave you with two final bits of information: the words you just read were writtenover the course of 3.85 miles, and whatever wisecracks you or the boys at the feed mill come up with, they’re trumped in spades by the look in my wife’s eyes when I come in the door after yet another nine-mile day at the office.
CHEATERS
    The other day I was teaching my brother John about cheaters. It’s not that we were thinking about becoming private investigators lurking in the lobby of the no-tell motel, it’s that his eyes are beginning to fail him. This tickles me pink, because he is a sawyer, a pilot, a singer of barbershop harmonies, owner and operator of his own bulldozer, and head-to-head a much better shot with his deer rifle. Whereas I am a really good typer. So I jump at any chance to be the one educating him.
    There is nothing dire afoot with my brother’s eyeballs, just the standard early-forties fade, the one that’s even harder to take for guys like us who have had better than 20/20 vision all our lives. Then comes the day when—at least this is how it happened with me—you raise your hand to clip your fingernails and they