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EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 14 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Center Ossipee, New Hampshire. May 23, 1990.

You think I’m kidding about bituminous concrete, but consider this: It’s all one huge piece.

About four years after moving into the truck and driving it over more than 10,000 miles of back roads, I find myself curious about how many miles of roadway have been laid across our country. So I take a trip from my grandmother’s house in Center Ossipee, where I am spending my second summer off the road, to the University of New Hampshire library about 50 miles away in Durham.

Here’s what I find:

First, the basics: Bitumen is the mineral grit of petroleum, the nonflammable component that remains as asphalt when everything else that easily evaporates or burns off is removed from petroleum. There is evidence that people around the Mediterranean were using asphalt from natural tar pits as binding and paving agents as early as 3800 B.C. But it wasn’t until nearly six millennia later, at the turn of the 20th century, that humans began manufacturing asphalt on an enormous scale that wasn’t so much mass production as mass byproduction. Asphalt is a byproduct of petroleum distillation. Kerosene, benzine, toluene and other volatile constituents of petroleum had found limited uses in the 19th century as lighting and cleaning fluids, but gasoline found its place in the 20th century. The automobile – the word literally means self-moving – is made mobile by a portable engine that derives its power from internal combustion, and the stuff that combusts is gasoline. The development of the automobile created a demand for gasoline that made petroleum refining a big business, but it also created a big problem: What to do with the residue, what to do with the sludge left in the bottom of the barrel after the gasoline, kerosene and other volatiles had been cooked off? An asphalt-based concrete, that’s what. Not only was there plenty of asphalt to bind together stone, crushed rock and gravel, but there were huge machines powered by internal combustion to spread the mixture around. In a sense, the gas-thirsty automobile invented the road that it rides on.

Now the facts: In this century, we Americans have spread bituminous concrete over nearly two million miles of public roads. It has been only natural to extend the blacktop into driveways, parking lots, shopping malls, residential subdivisions. I can’t find a reference book that will even estimate the amount of asphalt used in this off-road paving, but I’d be willing to bet it is at least half as much as the roads themselves.

Doing a little math: If all this blacktop were pieced together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, it would cover at least 20,000 square miles. Nine of our states are smaller than that. In fact, our hypothetical conglomerate of bituminous aggregate would cover all of Maryland, Delaware and most of New Jersey.

There’s another strange sense I get from studying bituminous concrete. Unlike portland cement, the concrete made from petroleum never quite loses its fluid quality. In a way, it’s like the material of America’s first great highways – its rivers and canals. Bituminous concrete flows like water, or, more appropriately, like a glacier, taking decades before its fluidity is apparent. North America’s most sought-after natural waterway, the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, wasn’t traveled entirely by ship until 1903-05, and even then, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen spent most of his two-year passage locked in ice. America’s first great manmade waterway, the Erie Canal between Albany and Buffalo, New York, was finished in 1825 but was useful less than a half century before railroads put it out of business. Building water canals required torturous excavations to depths that would accommodate boat drafts. Building bituminous concrete canals requires only superficial excavation because the fluid that is poured into them soon freezes into a surface that our internal combustion vessels can skim over, our destinations and urgencies too temporal for us to notice that our roadways too are moving. There is a modern Erie Canal, and it is called the New York Thruway. There are several modern Northwest Passages, and all of them bear interstate highway numbers.

Like one huge national canal, America’s bituminous concrete flows together. When we stand in our blacktop driveway, we are standing on one edge of a huge network of slowly flowing hydrocarbon that links us with the rest of the nation. Our driveway is connected to a street that flows into a larger road that then spills into even larger highways that branch off into smaller roads that separate into smaller streets that diffuse into other driveways – Aunt Tillie’s in Cape Cod or Uncle Ned’s in Washington State.

This huge network of bituminous concrete is a utility, like the telephone, electricity or natural gas systems, that is useful to all of us. It is especially useful to those of us whose homes are not at the back of the driveway but at the front.

– Sid Leavitt

Steven Sashen is a self-help teacher and author who writes the weblog The Anti-Guru, but we read him more like an antithesis guru — a guy who asks you to consider what it would be like if you didn’t follow a guru’s thesis.

(T)his site is about discovering how to look to yourself for the answers you seek. Or, at the very least, how to see more clearly when you’re looking out at teachers or teachings that promise answers to your questions. In fact, maybe seeing clearly what’s ‘out there’ is the easiest way to discover what’s ‘in here.’

The Anti-Guru is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites, and although this is one of those selections where you’ll find an occasional typo, misspelling or misplaced punctuation mark, Sashen’s writing has a conversational quality that helps express his ideas with clarity.

A central idea in Sashen’s guru antithesis is that there are different kinds of acceptance — accepting what is, for example, as opposed to accepting that you want to change it — and that the first leads to a continuation of pain while the second leads to an energy and attention that may bring healing. The idea is part of a technique developed by his friend, meditation teacher Robert Hover, whom he discusses in his Aug. 30 entry, first addressing Hover’s critics:

(The critics are) saying, ‘Meditation is about accepting things as they are, not trying to fix or change or improve them. It’s not about getting rid of the pain; it’s about accepting the pain as it is.’

First, nobody ever asked the critics this question: ‘Why would you want to accept the pain as it is?’ If they were rigorously honest, they would answer something like, ‘So I would be okay with it.’ ‘So it wouldn’t bother me.’ Or, if they were really honest, ‘So that it can change’ . . .

With Robert’s technique, you simply start with what’s true — ‘I have a pain I want to get rid of.’ Simple. Accepting that you want to change things is a profound kind of acceptance.

In fact, Robert explains, pain itself increases the amount of energy you have available to you, an amount of energy you can’t get if you’re not aware of some pain. And the desire to get rid of the pain is like the lens that focuses that energy . . . Meditation is actually a tool developed to imitate this natural process of Pain > Energy > Focused Attention > Healing.

In other words, life can be simpler — and sweeter — than a lot of the self-help gurus would make it.

Sashen says he spent three decades following ‘paths’ recommended by the gurus — everything from Aikido to Zen — until one day, as he explains in his Aug. 14, 2006, entry . . .

I stopped nodding my head and, instead, I began tilting my head. Almost literally, instead of nodding in agreement, I took on the attitude of ‘Hmm…? What’s really going on here? Is it true?’

Since that moment, my life has never been the same.

Like a magician who shows how the trick is done, Sashen invites our skepticism about all self-help phenomena — for example, a recent one called The Secret, a belief that positive thinking and a ‘Law of Attraction’ allow our feelings to influence events in our lives.

For now, let’s not even bother analyzing the evidence that The Secret works. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t long ago that we were saying, ‘I know that sacrificing a virgin every night brings the sun back the next day . . . because the sun keeps coming back every time we sacrifice a virgin.’

Or, as he told the Toronto Star in an interview for a May 18 article:

The ’secret’ – it’s an enticing notion. It’s the carrot on the stick. If someone says, `I know the answer,’ you’re going to want that. If you tell people that the answer has been there all along, and it’s been hidden from you – well, people will beat down the doors to get that.

Like the gurus, of course, Sashen also is a teacher. Some of it involves healing through Kabbalah, a Torah-inspired set of thoughts we don’t even pretend to understand. And he teaches advanced meditation and a concept he calls Quantum Wealth.

What we find appealing about The Anti-Guru is its invitation to join the dialectic — the guru’s thesis, the anti-guru’s antithesis and possibly, through your understanding, the synthesis of a better life.

– Sid Leavitt

When I was in high school, I used to look at alumni with bemusement, trying to imagine them walking through the halls where I walked, sitting in classes where I sat. I couldn’t do it. They looked too old.

Now I’ve had a chance to be on the other side of that looking glass.

I was a high school football star, you know — co-captain, all-state selection, in the large-school category, no less. Now before you start going woo-woo (or boooo), I will tell you that a large school in a small state is still a small school, where to be a star lineman sometimes required only reaching near adult size in the eighth grade — in those days, 6-feet, 190 pounds — and being even moderately coordinated, all of which would get you on the varsity team in your freshman year. And that my stardom ended with my senior year because I never got bigger and certainly never was fast enough to play in college. And so I’ve always had a sense of reality about my “stardom,” even then. Yes, we were undefeated state champions, but we played only eight games, all against schools not much bigger than us. My advice to an average-size frog: Get into a small pond. You will be big. Then let some time pass. You will be even bigger. Over the years, I’ve been amused at how much better that team and I get each year in the retelling. Hell, we’re legendary by now.

Well, it reached an apex on Friday. After decades of students passing by our old-fashioned trophies and yellowing photographs in hallway display cases, the school’s athletic department and the football booster club invited our team to reunite Friday for a homecoming dinner followed by a football game at which we would be presented to the hometown crowd.

My initial response to the invitation was, naw, I haven’t lived there for a long time, and at the few class reunions I’ve attended, I’ve traded the same football stories too many times with my old classmates. But then I got to thinking about it.

It has been 50 years, after all, and that’s one of the class reunions I’m definitely attending next summer. And I have to admit, I liked the idea of going out on that same field again. Or as I told my sister, who still lives in that area, in an email: “Who could pass up a chance to trot out on the field amid polite applause from a bunch of drunken fans who never heard of us geezers?” (Of course, it’s been a long time since I’ve trotted. Although I stretch and walk a treadmill nearly every day, my joints creak too much for running.)

So I went. My wife couldn’t go because she had to work (nearing retirement, you know), so I drove the five hours from New York to southern New Hampshire, and I went.

It was, in a word, great. The weather was cool and wet, just like many of the games in the old days, and the field smelled fresh and grassy, just as it did then. The hometown crowd was relatively sober — and still they cheered when we walked (some trotted, you showoffs) to the 50-yard line to be introduced at halftime. And it wasn’t tiresome to trade those old stories with just those classmates who were on the team (and to remember those, too many of those, who had died).

Our coach, now in his 70s and living on Long Island, couldn’t get to the reunion, and I missed him. But I got a chance again to read an homage I wrote about him (and us) when he was inducted into the local sports hall of fame 18 years ago. (That little speech later was incorporated into a book I wrote, “Adrift in America,” which is out of print but is posted in its entirety as a public service, mostly to me, in this weblog’s nonfiction section. If you care to read that passage, here’s the link.)

Those kids who are now at the school and on the team were, well, also great. Respectful, even reverential. And I kept my promise to myself not to tell them any good-old-days stories. They’ve got their own memories to build and watch grow.

I wonder if those alumni I remember seeing in high school thought the same way about us.

– Sid Leavitt

p.s. Sincere thanks to Denise Chick, Cindy Fowler and other volunteers from the Spaulding High Red Raiders Football Booster Club and to athletic director Dave Colson and his staff — and to the hometown crowd in Rochester, N.H. — for making us feel so welcome.

The best proofreaders also have a great sense of writing style, and if you mix that with a great sense of humor, you’ve got Bye Bye Buy.

No, that’s not a typo. The weblog’s title refers to the fact that its author and her husband decided to save money by not spending any this year on non-necessities like convenience food, restaurants, entertainment, fashion shopping, professional grooming, gifts and cable TV.

And how do I know about the best proofreaders? We’ll get to that in a minute. First, to the author, who writes under the nom de blog June Cutoff Cash — appropriate enough, considering her purpose. But the purpose, while interesting in itself, isn’t what makes Bye Bye Buy so appealing.

It’s that mix of style and humor. Which produces some wonderful asides.

For example, a Jan. 5 incident with a broken coffee machine and a co-worker — “the nicest co-worker you could ever ask to have, who wants me to say his name is Proton, which it isn’t. (Isn’t a proton something scientific, like a molecule or something?) Well, anyway, poor Proton was standing there, hapless” . . . when . . .

. . . five days into my no-spending year, I had my first hissy fit . . . ‘THERE IS NO COFFEE!’ I screamed at Proton. ‘THERE IS NO COFFEE AND I HAVEN’T HAD COFFEE YET AND I CAN’T GO BUY COFFEE CAUSE I AM NOT SPENDING ANY MONEY THIS YEAR!’

Somehow, Proton talked me down and we got the machine fixed. It just needed its something emptied. And all was well. Until I got an email from someone saying, ‘Hey, nice spazz-out in the coffee room!’ Turns out like 78 co-workers could hear every word. Nice. Nice way to climb the corporate ladder.

And by the way, I had a $5 gift certificate to Starbucks in my purse the whole time.

It’s like you are her best friend, and she’s telling you her story, asides and all. Which can be really annoying unless the storyteller is a really good writer.

Which she is. As well as a good proofreader. Which isn’t good if you’re now in your early 40s and didn’t have good eyesight to begin with. Thus, the visit to the eye doctor that led to her April 9 entry:

If you are now thinking, ‘Oh a proofreader. How fun. I love to read,’ please let me take this opportunity to fill your nasal cavities with a fast-hardening cement. You do not love to PROOFread. You love to read a nice novel. You like to catch up on that Miss Marple, see what shenanigans she is up to now. So do I. That, however, is not PROOFREADING. Unless you read like this: ‘Y (capital Y? Yes.)ou caaann copyyy saaaved (saved past tense? Yeah. Okay.) dataaaa (data? Are they using data as a plural? Are they using data as a plural in the rest of this thing? Okay.) (Wait. Didn’t it say 10 pages ago that you CAN’T copy saved data? Hang on.) . . .’

That is what I do all day. That is what I have done all day for the last 10 years. And on my lunch hour? I read. After work? I like to do me some reading.

You can imagine the fine effect this has had on my eyes.

She was doing this work in Los Angeles when the year began, and not spending on extras isn’t easy in L.A. where life is all extras. But in August, she and her husband — his blog name is Marvin Gardens, yes, Monopoly fans — moved to rural North Carolina where he found a teaching job and she eventually got freelance proofreading work on line.

They’re still saving money, but not as much as in L.A. I hope this doesn’t end Dec. 31. Because it’s going to take me at least that long to figure out why their blog nameplate shows only British currency.

So how do I know about good proofreaders? Because in the old days in the newspaper business, we had lots of them. But then computers arrived to replace the proofreaders. I came to work one day in Portland, Maine, at a newly computerized newspaper when I noticed a blown-up xerox on the wall, a copy of an obituary we ran the day before. I’ve changed the woman’s name but not what it said: “Mabel Peach, a longtime proofreader for the Portland Newspapers, died Monday after . . . etc.” Our new computers, coming to the word ‘proofreader’ at the end of the top line, had broken it into ‘proo-’ and, beginning the next line, ‘freader.’ We missed you, Mabel.

Check out Bye Bye Buy, the best proofreader blog we could find on Google and now the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt

EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 41 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:

Old Orchard Beach, Maine. August 24, 1986.

There was a zen to my stepfather, but I don’t recognize it until today, a few months after the 10th anniversary of his death. Today is my 46th birthday, and I have had a few beers at lunch with some old friends in Biddeford to celebrate the occasion. I am making a left turn off Saco Avenue into the campground at Old Orchard Beach when I see his hands on my steering wheel.

Years of working in the woods made my stepfather’s hands thick and rough, but they held a steering wheel with the grace of a violist’s hands on the neck of his instrument, turning the wheel delicately, as if seeking a harmony in it.

I don’t know if my stepfather had always driven that way. By the time I first knew him, he was nearly as old as I am when I discover myself driving my truck the same way he did his. Now it is my hands that are thicker and rougher – age takes nearly as great a toll as work – and they are turning the wheel with the same soft deliberation I saw in his hands.

He drove everything like that – trucks, cars, horses. He worked most of his years in the woods with horses. There was always a pair, if he was working for himself, sometimes several teams if he was working for a lumber company. They were usually big muscular geldings of Belgian, Clydesdale and Percheron bloodlines with monosyllabic names like Bob, Dick or Tom.

Logging is dangerous work involving cumbersome weights and intricate entanglements. Without subtlety as well as strength, a logging operation can leave ugly scars on both loggers and forest. I know it sounds fanciful, but trees give themselves up more easily to some people than to others. As much as I worked in the woods as a young man, I remember the struggle of dropping and cutting up a tree, sweating and swearing as I tried to remove the pieces from the forest while branches whipped my face and twigs grabbed my feet. It was different with my stepfather. He and his horses moved through the woods with solicitude and respect, leaving the ground untorn, the limbs and brush in neat piles, the remaining trees in air and sunlight that would nourish their growth in years to come.

My stepfather treated us kids with care, keeping us in line with a gentle sort of humor that sometimes chided but rarely insulted. I remember as a 10-year-old learning how to play a plastic ukelele someone had given me. I don’t think the gift had been my stepfather’s idea. After one particularly long session of plucking and twanging, he came in from the next room: “You’re getting pretty good at that. You know, there’s a lot of people outdoors who’ve been asking to hear you play.”

There was wisdom, too, although I wouldn’t understand some of it until years later. In our first summer together at a small logging camp on Kennebunk Pond, Maine, I told him I wanted to grow up to be a logger, too, just like him. “No,” he said, “the only kind of wood you want to push around is the stuff they put in pencils.”

A few years later, when we had moved from Maine back into New Hampshire, I got up for my newspaper route one morning and noticed that the weather was cold and blustery, although not harsh enough to keep my stepfather and his crew from going into the woods and certainly not harsh enough to keep newspapers from being delivered.

“You know, life ain’t so complicated,” my stepfather told me as he headed for the outdoors. “It’s just damned hard sometimes.”

One of the pithiest lessons he taught me was how to split wood with an axe: “You throw the axehead where you want it,” he said. That was it. No fancy stuff about arcs and angles and axe handles. Oh sure, there was the advice about keeping the axe sharp and my feet out of the way, but what he wanted me to understand was that only two things mattered in splitting wood – the wood and the thing that split it. Concentrate on putting them together, and it will happen. By god, it worked. As long as my mind saw the axehead going into the wood where I wanted, my body knew how to do it.

I will split wood for my grandmother one day and think about the zen archer, his bow drawn and his face turned away from the target, knowing not in his eyes but in his mind, perhaps in his soul, where the arrow must go.

– Sid Leavitt

So there I am, looking for bartender blogs and not too discouraged by a web comment from a fellow searcher, Mark Hensler, that good ones are hard to find. Because I have found a good bartender blog. Right near the top of Google.

It’s written by a guy named Joe — yeah, Joe the bartender, shades of the old ‘Jackie Gleason Show.’ And Joe owns a bar in Seattle, right near a hospital from which a lot of his patrons drop in — an interesting bunch that includes surgeons, interns, nurses. And Joe has a life partner named Walter with whom he has adopted twin babies. And Joe writes the juiciest details about his patrons’ lives — the plastic surgeon who’s having breakup sex with a surgery intern, the chief of surgery who’s an alcoholic, the resident physician who’s in trouble because a baby was kidnapped on her shift. And what’s more — get a load of this — Joe names names.

God, this is too good to be true.

And, of course, it is too good to be true. Because any idiot except me — any idiot, that is, who watches nighttime soap operas — would have known that the weblog The Emerald City Bar is a complete fiction, a spinoff from the ABC series ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’

Even I got the picture when it slowly crept up on me, joyous as I was at finding this site, that Seattle Grace was a strange name for a hospital and that the Peyton Place antics of the bar patrons seemed, well, a bit extravagant. A trip to Google for ‘Seattle Grace’ brought me back to my senses.

And Joe seemed so nice.

There are two other blogs spun from ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ one of them another fake blog — is that a ‘fog’? — called The Nurse’s Station, written by a fictitious ‘Debbie’ as in the subtitle ‘Debbie Does Seattle Grace,’ and another entitled Grey Matter that does in fact tell you it’s from the writers of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ telling you what’s happening on the show.

The fact is, there are plenty of blogs attached to soap operas. TV Guide has one, as do the shows ‘As the World Turns,’ ‘All My Children,’ ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ and so on. But all the ones I could find are done by writers summarizing episodes or by some of the stars involved or by fans themselves. Some of these blogs draw a lot of comments, mostly from readers who seem to have some sense of reality.

The Emerald City Bar also draws a lot comments from readers, but some of them, quite frankly, don’t seem to understand that it’s all stories, not real life. Well, I’m told that a lot of soap opera fans — let’s be charitable — don’t care to make the distinction.

I suppose ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ isn’t a soap opera in the traditional sense — it’s on at night, and it’s weekly rather than daily. But any show that you can call ‘a continuing series,’ building on the story and characters from preceding episodes . . . it’s a soap opera.

I guess Mark Hensler was right. He was looking for bartender blogs that would be the equal of waiter blogs he enjoyed — Waiter Rant (see our blogroll), The Insane Waiter or I Serve Idiots — but couldn’t find any. Heh, heh, and I thought I was so clever because I had gotten one. When all I got was soap in my eyes.

Our blogroll won’t be carrying it, but here is the link for The Emerald City Bar. We can’t list it because we’re not sure it was the best I could find, just the first I could find. I’m sure there are others out there.

I’m just afraid to look.

– Sid Leavitt

The spam count in the comment section of this website has suddenly dropped from dozens per day to barely a handful in the past week. And we don’t know why.

Did the spam filter in our WordPress platform or in our Yahoo email account suddenly start working better? Or was it the emails we sent to several of the vendors listed in the spam?

Or was it the FBI?

It’s doubtful the electronic filters are now working any better than they had been. And we’re not confident that our emails to the vendors could account for the precipitous decline in spam.

We should say that one of the vendors, Toyota, was pretty attentive to a heads-up we sent in early September advising them that Heritage Toyota in South Burlington, Vt., was listed in a spam comment we had received. We said that we didn’t think the corporation was involved but that possibly an Internet advertiser, maybe working indirectly for an unknowing dealership, was padding its hit count by spamming and thus overcharging somebody for advertising. In a series of emails, Toyota said it checked further but couldn’t find anything.

The previous month, we had sent a similar heads-up to State Farm Insurance about its name appearing in our comment spam. They thanked us for our “comments and suggestions” and said they were passing along “this useful information” for review. End of discussion. We weren’t surprised. It was State Farm who screwed a bunch of southern California homeowners after a huge fire four years ago. The homeowners originally bought ‘full replacement’ coverage, but the company later switched it to ‘extended replacement,’ which sounded even better but in reality was much less coverage.

You know, insurance companies are screwing this entire country left and right. They collect ever-increasing premiums and what they don’t siphon off as profits is spent hiring cadres of people to deny or delay claims of customers who don’t have the money or time to sue them. You want to privatize Medicare and put it in the hands of people like this? No thanks, we’ll take cadres of bureaucrats in Washington who may be slow, inefficient and even stupid, but they’re not crooks.

But we digress.

Spam — not the canned meat, of course, but the unsolicited commercial email — can be generated by computers by the millions at practically no cost, looking for just one recipient to bite. Most recipient computers have their own programs to filter out this stuff, but the problem with comment spam is that most of it starts with a comment.

Most of ours were headed by Greek names like Aristotelis, Spiridon, Christodoulos, Alexiou. It reminded us of the spammer’s dodge of using letters from the Greek alphabet that look like English letters and spell out a product or message but slip past the content-based filters because they make no sense.

All our comment spam started with a comment — usually one word like ‘nice’ or ‘cool’ — and then drifted into ads for cars, drugs, porn. Not all came under Greek names. For example, we were told, ‘Your site is great,’ by a sender named Big Butt Milf (’milf’ is an acronym for ‘mothers I’d like to f—’). And ‘Wow! Thanks!’ was a note of encouragement we received not only from Double Penetration but also from Huge Double Penetration.

And some of it was just gibberish — nothing but a series of recursive links, like somebody’s spam program had a nervous breakdown.

And now for the FBI.

It wasn’t WordPress comment spam that we emailed the FBI about. It was an email via Yahoo from someone claiming to be the ‘Bank of America’ saying they were updating their accounts and needed all our bank numbers — pins, accounts, etc. — and other personal information. Since we’re not Bank of America customers, we thought the FBI would like to know at their tips website. We did this advisedly, because this is the same site where you can report ’suspected terrorism.’ And we think this government’s ‘anti-terrorism’ program is a bunch of crap run by rightwing political operatives.

But our comment spam is down to a trickle.

You know, it wasn’t difficult dealing with all that spam. Just approve the legitimate comments, then a couple of clicks to mass-delete the rest.

So who’s doing it now?

– Sid Leavitt

Mike’s Circular File is a potpourri of musings by a 40-something white guy from Chicago — some of them funny, others touching, all touched by a mild cynicism — but what sold me was his MySpace portrait as Mr. Ipanema.

So there’s Mike Pontillo, standing above the beach at Rio de Janeiro, holding what appears to be a guidebook to Brazil. Against a backdrop of surf, sand and sleek sunbathers, the rather endomorphic Pontillo is bundled into a heavy coat, scarf, gloves, ear-flap hat and a pinched expression, all of this accompanied by a caption in Latin that, to the best of my memory of classes in that language 50 years ago in high school, says, “I can’t hear you. There’s a banana stuck in my ear.”

What’s not to like about this happy traveler?

That’s what makes his infrequent entries — only about three dozen dating back to November 1999 — so appealing: They tell you that a 40-something white guy from Chicago, feeling pinched by reality, is still willing to face it on his own terms. A guy on a sun-drenched beach in winter clothes.

Pontillo, a technical analyst with a background in computers, describes himself as a political liberal with a conservative lifestyle, a dichotomy that appears in much of his writing. He was so upset by the 2004 presidential election that he couldn’t write for a while, but he also ranted that same year about a new law signed by the Democratic governor of Illinois giving nursing mothers the right to breast feed in any public place in the state:

In the course of a given day, I have been known to perform several ‘completely natural acts’ of my own. However, most people would object, strenuously, if I insisted on performing those acts in public. (’Lactation Frustration,’ Aug. 16, 2004)

He rails at religious zealots willing to kill, injure or ostracize others for their beliefs, but is put off by a “dirty little secret” among gay men:

There are a lot of really cool things about being gay. Well, except one. Let me explain where I stand on the issue of penetration. Ain’t nobody sticking nothing in me nowhere, no way, no how. So I’m not allowed to be gay. They put you on probation if you only want to pitch. The whole system breaks down if everyone’s a pitcher. Somebody’s got to catch. (’Homosexuality: The Final Solution,’ Feb. 25)

And, oh yes, the only way to hang toilet paper is so that it unrolls from the underside, not the top: “Don’t argue with me. You’re just wrong.” (’Let’s Give It Up for … Lent,’ Feb. 9, 2005)

But among these criticisms of society and culture, most of them rather mild, are some powerful reflections on the human condition.

His first entry, Nov. 8, 1999, an essay on the life and early death of Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton, reaffirms Pontillo’s reasons for giving up Catholicism and his belief in God but not his belief in the goodness of people like Payton, a man known for his charitable work, devotion to family, courage in the face of his illness.

How many suicide bombers do you suppose there would be if they couldn’t be coerced into throwing away their earthly lives for the promise of some kind of paradise in the hereafter? John Lennon posed the question years ago: How would you live your life if there were no heaven? . . . Maybe we would realize that there just isn’t time for selfishness and pettiness. That the only things that outlast us are the impressions we make on others by living this life as well and as fully as we can . . . Maybe if we realized how limited our time really was, we might all live our lives like Walter Payton.

In ‘Unspoken Vows,’ July 25, 2005, a friend whose marriage has failed shares the following thoughts:

Maybe we all had our own extra, unspoken vows . . . Obviously my wife did. Right after the vows we had rehearsed, she added an extra one, ‘Until such time as I decide this relationship no longer meets my needs.’ I just didn’t hear it. Maybe the organ was too loud.

Mine? Yeah, I guess I had one, too. Mine was, ‘With this ring, I hereby abdicate all responsibility for my life and well-being.’

The pain of separation is the theme of the autobiographical ‘Room 219′ (Oct. 19, 2004), and in his latest entry, ‘The D-word’ (Aug. 8), Pontillo talks about his family’s history of divorce, a melancholy essay that concludes with the end of his own marriage.

Mike’s Circular File is the latest addition to our blogroll of well-written sites.

– Sid Leavitt