It's -9 degrees here in Chicago, the Bears lost the Super Bowl last night, I have been in a writing funk, and the Bleak Late-Winter has officially arrived. It's so cold my face still hurts from walking to the coffee shop. On the writing front my mind has been filling up with half-ideas complete with half-titles, half-characters, half-mantras, half-conclusions and I have not even been half-writing them. It's that kind of half-assed literary life that will drive a brother half-crazy if he's not careful. It's not like I haven't been trying to punch my way out...

I had another boxing lesson last Friday, not with Ray, but with one of his partners. A younger guy named Jimmy Mango who grew up in the suburbs with Italian parents from the Taylor St. Little Italy. We didn't really hit it off at first. I think I'm too tall and skinny and my clothes were a little goofy. He's the type of guy who has blue-black hair, a blue-black 5 o'clock shadow, a barrel chest, a black Armani T and a gold chain. But we got in the ring and he had me move around and shadow box for a couple rounds. "All the good fighters shadow box," he said. "The bag gives you bad habits unless somebody's standing right over you. You can't cheat shadow boxing. Stay loose. You're too tight." And so there I was bouncing around the ring and trying to throw my combinations into the air with efficiency. I started to like Jimmy and he started to like the way I listened to him and did what he told me. "Keep your chin down. I don't know if you're ever going to fight but if you are, you'll do yourself a big favor to keep your chin down." Jimmy had won Golden Gloves at 135 lbs in 1987, but as he said he couldn't make that weight now even if you took one of his legs off. We worked out to the bell of the rounds, three minutes on and thirty seconds off. He brought out the mitts after the first two. I was already breathing hard. We worked on the jab and the straight right again for two rounds. "Boxing ain't complicated," he said. "Repetitive motion. The same shit over and over again till it happens without you noticing." He had a kind of matter-of-fact attitude about the whole thing. He decided I was ready to learn to throw a hook. "Drop your left hand down to your waist. Now turn your hips and hit my hand. Wow. How bout that. Your hook's better than your right." I have a hitch in my right hand. I raise the glove before I throw it. It reminds of me of my tennis forehand. I'm always inventing new ways to screw it up. It was a fun work out. I felt a little more comfortable than the last time and I liked moving around the ring. My left shoulder burned and is still sore today. The left shoulder is the source of the jab. "Left shoulder's the strongest muscle in a fighter's body," Jimmy said. Not in mine. Not yet.

I went to a party on Friday night. It was pretty fun, I guess, but I kept winding up in discussions about local politics. There were a lot of current and former activists there and I ended up in heated interchanges with them, espousing my sort of reactionary value set, hating on do-gooders and whiners, and then feeling bad deep down in side that there is, in my world view, no place anymore to make change. I have become cynical. I think to really explain why, I'd have to spend some more time on it but the argument really comes to this, that the people who have the most liberal and Utopian views don't ever engage with the system except by way of the non-profit world, which is not only tax-exempt but responsibility exempt, work ethic exempt, and morally exempt from failure. The worst thing about the whole evening was that while other people were starting those conversations, I couldn't get myself to shut up about it. People were looking at me like I had blood dripping from my teeth. Note to self: you still have some hurt inside you from your failed career as a do-gooding non-profiteer.

The best conversation all night was when San Hoon, a Korean movie producer who works with my friend and host Masahiro Sugano, told me in his deceptive accent that he wanted his son to be the greatest quarterback in the NFL, "better than Peyton Manning, bigger and better than all the white quarterbacks and black quarterbacks." And I could close my eyes and see a future with a giant Korean in Florida Gators colors zipping passes into the flat and believe in America that way, without activism maybe, but with the motor of immigrant ambition forever churning forward and pushing aside the complacency of THE DOMINANT CULTURE.

On Saturday the cold set in. I had a hangover, maybe from rasping around all night about politics, and I felt vaguely ashamed and depressed. I watched Arsenal tie Middlesborough with ten men, another Henry game-saver in the late stages. Not inspiring this time though, a sign of this season's futility, that in spite of not having lost in over ten games, we can't close the gap with Manchester United, who thumped Tottenham at White Hart Lane, and can't overtake Liverpool for third position. I lifted weights on Friday too, for the first time since college, and my whole body was screaming at me for my impetuousness. It's too early for a mid-life crisis and I'm too poor for a Porsche.

That night Carolyn and I grabbed dinner at Lao Sze Chuan and went to a theater production at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Lao Sze Chuan is one of the more upscale spots in Chinatown but it's really good and the owner is a staunch Democratic contributor, if that matters to you. The food is mostly seasoned with a combination of Sichuan red chili and black peppercorn and is very spicy. They are meant to also have good Peking duck and hot pots, which are like Chinese sukiyaki, a hot bowl of broth in which to boil all manner of things. We had kung pao shrimp, dry chili beef, and spinach with garlic sauce. All very good. I have never been a kung pao fan but their version comes in a brown ambrosia flavored with just the right amount of cooking wine.

The theater production was called Amajuba and it was a sort of South African confessional, featuring the dramatized life stories of five members of South Africa's "lost generation." The lost generation were children under Apartheid and have the scars to prove it, but they have no cause anymore and have to live as broken people making meaning in a world that no truth and reconciliation will ever fully heal. The production was beautiful in moments and trite in others. The most powerful part for me was the story of a colored guy who was called Bushy and Hottentot growing up and tortured for being "almost someone," neither black nor white. I thought of my friend from New York Clint Groom , who grew up in a township in Durban, his own blood a blend of Xlosa, Zulu, Hindustan, and the English midlands. Clint chased footballs out of poverty, eventually captaining the South Africa U-23 team when it was still embargoed from the Olympics, and winning a scholarship to Philadelphia Textile. He was, last I knew, a designer for Tommy Jeans in NYC. Groomy, as he was known, told me the story of his cousin being beaten to death, his eyes cut out of his head, in a gang dispute in his township.

Sunday morning was slow, until I got marching orders from Mitch to show up at the Union Park Bar to watch the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl started at 5:25pm Central Time, but in order to be sitting down to watch it at a bar, you had to arrive at 11am. We got there a little after noon. I settled into the idea that a Sunday of low grade drinking at a bar might not be the worse thing for a guy feeling vague and melancholic. It wasn't the worst thing at all. It was pretty darn nice, mostly just to spend that much time, eight hours, with the same people and not do anything but talk. The Bears lost in a messy inevitable game which exposed them for what we all knew they were, a pretty good team without a quarterback and with a good defense that can't win games like the 85 Bears. Peyton Manning finally got his ring and will now have his proverbial dick sucked in even more imaginative ways by the media.

I'm back in the saddle today, working on Annie's Gun again, my grrl power Western short story, and dreaming of destroying stereotypes. Doesn't the world need a white upper-middle class, intellectual middleweight champ with a killer left hook?