It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

By Mark McNease

The food magically showed up at our front door, delivered by someone who, like Santa Claus, made their rounds unseen, past apathetic doormen and suspicious neighbors with insomnia.

My Amazing Weight Loss Journey began five years ago. With great effort and dedication, I’ve managed to shed four pounds since that first fateful calorie count. How did I achieve this feat of negligible weight loss? I never thought you’d ask.

It all started with a now-defunct company called Lean Chefs. For a reasonable fee, they delivered a day’s worth of prepared food while we slept: breakfast, lunch, dinner, and two yummy snacks. The food magically showed up at our front door, delivered by someone who, like Santa Claus, made their rounds unseen, past apathetic doormen and suspicious neighbors with insomnia. I would peer into the corridor first thing in the morning and there it was, a small black package at my feet, looking like something that might require a call to the bomb squad under normal circumstances. Inside it was the coming day’s food with an ice pack and an unspoken promise: eat these healthy provisions, and only these, and miracle weight loss will occur.

It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

By Mark McNease

Who doesn’t want to gaze at a baseball cap or coffee cup forty years after buying it and remember that special vacation?

How many boxes does it take to hold a life? It’s a question many of us ask when we find ourselves moving from one home to another. A home is in many ways who we are: that place where we’ve spent most of our time, where we’ve created identities linked to the rooms in which we sleep, eat and bathe, and where we contemplate our daily existence. Then a new phase beckons, a new adventure, and we see it all in front of us, boxed and packed to be taken by car, truck or hand cart to the next phase, the next identity with a few revisions.

It’s always One Thing or Another … a lighthearted look at aging, life, and the absurdities of it all.

By Mark McNease

Imagine the despair young people feel today. Imagine the frustration at being governed by the old who ignore their fears, anxieties, terrors, hopes, dreams and concerns …

Not long ago I was among those crusty older people who bemoaned and occasionally belittled younger generations for effectively forgetting I’d existed. As a sixty-year-old man (I tend to round up), I was embittered to know so many people even a decade younger did not share my memories of the devastation of AIDS, of my government’s indifference to that plague, of Madonna’s performance in a wedding dress at the Grammys, or of the celebration in the streets of West Hollywood following Bill Clinton’s election. It was, I insisted, a matter of preserving history, without admitting it was as much my personal history I wanted preserved as that of my country or tribe.