I can't tell you for how many years October, my birth month, has brought with it pressure, if not outright crisis. My poor car is still unsold though it shines like a new penny. All my various writing projects are all coming due and at me at the same time. I am without a girlfriend and in two weeks I will be forty-five years old.

My friend Greg Tate shares my birthday and he will be fifty and friends of his are throwing a day-long celebration. Luckily it is not actually on our birthday so I can go. For our birthday I would like nothing more than to hole up in a fleabag hotel room for twenty-four hours with a bottle of vodka and a pocket full of powerbars. I think that could be a great business. Sort of like those love hotels that charge by the hour, these hotels would have birthday specials and Valentine's Day special for singles where you check in on the eve of the event, they give you unlimited use of the minibar for 24 hours, and then at the stroke of midnight after the horror has passed you stumble outside either one day older (or having survived another Valentine's Day).

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I've got two kids to take care of. I can't exactly leave them a big bowl of food while I pity party.

It is also true that they are very powerful anti-depressants. I was in the middle of cataloging the various stressors on my life right now when I heard Chet rolling my skateboard up down our long hall. He was supposed to be taking his shower. As I prepared to scold him I looked up and saw my six-year-old float by on his knees, very naked, one arm thrust forward as if her were crossing the Delaware.

My friends, especially when their wives are out of town, tell me, "I don't know how you do it." I invariably shrug and say it's just the hand I was dealt. But the truth is more nuanced. It is much harder. Raising my kids is more my full-time job than my other full-time job of teaching at Columbia or my other full-time job of finishing this book, revising that play, re-starting that screenplay. And then there are my part-time jobs of an internet startup that I am crazy about and writing for the HuffingtonPost and NPR. Not to mention my hobbies of yoga, the gym and overseeing my leaky kidneys.

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I will have to be better prepared in the future for the deluge of responsibilities that fall on me in the fall. The kids and I both begin our school years. Also, I am in the process of selling my house and my car, the lovely car on my home page, is also up for sale.

Funny how I was never more relaxed this summer, living in my old house in staged furniture. I felt like the kids in "The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. ..." who ran away and lived in the Met. Only it used to be my house.

The big thing I had to do in the fall was go back and see my nephrologist. I see him every two months. A few weeks ago I was feeling super lousy (and wrote about it here) but on Friday when I went to see him I felt swell. The day before I had my blood drawn so that he could tell me how my beans were holding up.

I had been hovering around 20.6% kidney function (for African-Americans, 16% for everyone else). The cut off to be on the transplant list is 20%. My creatinine then was 4.1. Normal is 1 or so. Now it is 4.4. Hooray! I can get on the list now.

I feel fantastic, in general, and don't have time to lay in bed and wait for the new kidney they shove in to heal. Still, it's good to be on the list.

My dad was already on dialysis when his creatinine was my this high. Sword of Damocles.

And yet, if I get (I guess, "when I get" is a little more realistic) I will be able to eat what I want again. That's something. And Alonzo Mourning seems to be doing great. Former San Antonio Spur Sean Elliot too.

I just wish that when they put the new organ inside you it would be somehow better than human. As long as I'm being cut open I'd like to get a little bionic boost.

The kids have no idea what's going on and when friends try to talk to me about it in front of them I shut them up. I'm all they've got on the regular and I can't have them worry that I won't always be around.

They are magnificent and have already been through enough.

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Summer seems like a dream to me. It feels as if a starting gun went off the day after Labor Day and I'm racing and out of breath but I'm in a marathon not a sprint. Not good.

School starts for the kids but it also starts for me and then there the afterschool hell that I am wrestling with. I want so much for them but I don't have anyone to pick them up and take them around from Tae Kwon do to ballet to quantum mechanics for kids. Look, I am determined not to be one of those overscheduling parents but I also don't want to deny them. Juggling it all with my class schedule is boiling my guts.

But I am very proud of the fact that I am feeding them better. It is no longer just leftovers. I actually turned on the oven. All right, I didn't bake anything but the cranberry chicken I bought at the grocery store I heated in the oven instead of the microwave. I also heated some roasted potatoes that the store had prepared. I'm sure I could have done them myself and will. Soon. I swear.

But I did make the caprese myself, the tomatoes were fresh from Ava's friend's grandmother's garden and I bought fresh basil and mozzarella di bufala fresca. It was great and they love it.

When their mom called to say hello (as she does most every evening) I made them tell her how well they were eating. She's a raw vegan.

After dinner we all built Chet's birthday present. A 3D pirate ship puzzle. It was pretty difficult, hundreds of pieces and nothing written just color coded maps. After two hours I realized that I had made a huge mistake and was tempted to crush the thing but then I stopped myself and made myself finish it. I don't want him to abandon things just when they get difficult. I don't want that for myself either.
So, back to the phones. I have to find out when ballet meets and if I can find somebody to take Ava there.

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I am feeling marginally less self-pitying now. The persistent nausea has lifted, in general, and my spirits are up. I have not one but two offers on my house in LA and it looks like my lovely Mustang, the one in the photo, is finally ready to be sold on eBay on Saturday. As you can see, it's a time for big changes around here.

My friends can't believe that I'm selling the car. "My other son," I liked to call it. But it's just been garaged for a year in LA and my friend who was supposed to start it up (that's right Yule, I'm talking about you) neglected it horribly and the transmission went and it was just generally deteriorating rapidly. I want to find it a good new home with someone who will baby it as much as I did.

Also, is it just me, or has the academic year just begun and am I the only one already behind? It's almost eleven at night and I haven't written (or re-written) a lick. Getting the kids settled into school, getting myself settled into my new classes at Columbia is draining. While in LA I was a yoga and surf rat, back here I haven't done anything. I haven't even eaten, most days, because I'm running around and it gets too late. I need to fix that. A wife would be pretty damn great round about now. Sex once in a while wouldn't suck either.

I did do one thing cool and productive, though. I recorded another NPR commentary. I'm hoping it runs this week.

And the image that made my day worth it today was snaggletoothed Chet, naked because he was waiting for Ava to finish her shower, riding his skateboard on his knees back and forth down our long hallway.

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Summer already seems like a distant dream. The kids started the day after Labor Day and I thought that i started teaching at Columbia the day after. The morning after dropping them off for their first day at school I casually emailed the department and they told me that my first class was in a few hours.

I fired up the computer and finished the polish of my syllabus and raced to school. I didn't have time to round up a sitter, however, so I taught the three hour class for an hour and then put on Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels and raced downtown to pick up the kids.

This first week has been like that. I'm working on an internet startup and the phone rings and it's my brilliant editor at NPR and she wants yet another tweak to my latest piece. While I'm talking to her the cellphone goes off and tells me there's yet another delay in finishing the work. Meanwhile the people who have made an offer on the house are due to see it again at three. Then a bit later the guy helping me sell my car in LA calls and says the new door panels aren't quite right and need to be reworked. Nothing is easy, nothing is finishing.

And though I love this city the noise and the smell are at times overwhelming. Especially at 3:20 yesterday morning when some sort of alarm went off and kept going off.

I knew this would be a hectic time. Even before I became an academic I have always been more in tune with the academic calendar. The day after Labor Day is the starting gun to all the ambitious projects I've got rattling around in my head. It is also the time when everyone, it seems, wants their money. The kids's afterschool, rent, insurance, they have all come due at the same moment.

On top of that I feel pretty lousy. My nephrologist had to postpone our appointment. I don't know if I'm just anemic again, which feels gross and has me, as I did yesterday, take the kids to school and come right back to sleep for a few hours, but I'm also often nauseated. My fear is that it is my creatinine rising even higher, a sign that the kidneys are really failing. Somewhere around the numbers that I have been hovering around people start to feel gross. Then again, I am a big hypochondriac, have thought that was happening before and have always been wrong.

The gross feeling, however, is making me think of Sekou Sundiata, an artist friend of friends who just died at the age of 58. He too had kidney disease and did a performance piece about getting a transplant. I'd love to live much longer than 58. I'll be 45 in October. That gives me thirteen years. Chet will be nineteen, Ava, twenty-two, the exact same age I was when my dad died. I turned out all right and guess I can live with that but it's not my first choice. My first choice is that I live to 100, spending the last ten or twenty years of my life in a small house on a big private beach.

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