Yesterday we visited the family homestead, an acre of land off Deer Run Road in Franklin. The sheep across the way greeted us with an air of skepticism. Someday the barn across the street will completely collapse, and when it does I will be a bit sadder. My digital videos merely suggest the sunny, verdant splendor of the place.

The news reports became constant on the radio shortly after we shot our beautiful videos: Hurricane Isabel is coming, get what you need, prepare for the coming storm. We bought boxes of pasta and protein bars at the Valu Rite and headed back to the Candlelight Inn.

I called my mother. She said, “I received a call from your brother earlier today. He’s a bit scared about driving his motorcycle in the rain, so I think he’s decided not to come to Franklin this year.”

I said, “What about my cousins?”

She said, “Well, Amtrak has cancelled its trains due to the storm, so they won’t be able to join you this year either.”

I called my father. He said, “The television is showing pictures of people and cars getting washed away in North Carolina. I think we’ll have to skip the family reunion this year.”

It’s just after midnight in Franklin, West Virginia. The wind is moderate, around twenty miles per hour, but the rain is unceasing, sheets and sheets of thick walls of water slapping against the gabled roof of this place. Tropical Storm Isabel has thrown four inches of rain at our Victorian bed-and-breakfast in the past four hours, with four more inches to come before sunrise. Our 1908 house is safely ensconced on a hill, and the house’s drainage system is working correctly, but Main Street has turned into a small and fast river before us, probably impassable by anything but a 4×4 truck.

The eye of the tropical storm will pass over me within the hour. I expect there will be a quietness in the air at that time, as I become the president pro tempore and sole attendee of this year’s Byrd family reunion.

The blacktop wends in hairpins and snaky twists as we descend through the fog of the Shenandoah mountains on US-33. Through the gray haze we can make out Germany Valley, green and grand and lovely, to our left: a pattern of sunlight cuts us a generous wedge of lush mountain. As our rented Mitsubishi exits the clouds, the mountains turn to valleys filled with milk cows and five-wire sheep fences and cockeyed power poles and dilapidated, collapsing barns. The sign says, “Welcome to Franklin, W.Va.,” and they sincerely mean it.

I have blood here. Everyone in this town, me included, is descended from Ambrose Meadows. During the Civil War, Ambrose was shot by Northern troops while praying to God. His house was burned, his wife and children turned into the cold.

Not a damned thing has happened in Franklin since then. The Appalachian mountains can only be passed on single-lane highways and there are no airports within two hundred miles of this town. Generations of mayors have come and gone from Franklin over the past hundred and fifty years, each one promising to bring economic prosperity to this tiny city. Still, the all-night diners close at 8:00 p.m., and the front doors of the Victorian ladies remain unlocked.

The pamphlet, “Walking Tour of Historic Franklin, W. Va.,” has this to say about the Candlelight Inn: “Walter and Jessie O. Wilson Bowman built their Victorian house soon after their marriage in 1908, and their initials are carved into the stone foundation.” It’s three stories of China dolls and ornate carved furniture and sweet musty bedspreads, sprawling smugly on Main Street of this small town.

We checked into room 1 late last night. A blonde doll beamed down on us from a high mantel. Our host, Kim, greeted us this morning with waffles and coffee. “I’m off to pick up my grandmother at Dulles this evening, so unfortunately I won’t be around tonight,” she said. I settled in to doing some serious work on the Rocky Horror video.

After a few hours I took a break. As I flushed the toilet off room 1, it backed up. My wife found a plunger and I took a few plunges at it: no luck. We called Kim, and Kim called Ed, and Ed called Forrest; Forrest brought a pipe snake. Forrest began snaking out the ancient sewer system embedded within the stone foundation. He hit a snag, we heard a dark barnyard sound and the toilet regurgitated gallons of sewage into our room.

We picked all our stuff off the floor in one large motion and sprinted into room 3, on the second floor. Ten minutes ago, after the plumbing equivalent of a double bypass, sewage is now flowing sensibly again at the Candlelight Inn. It’s midnight at the Candlelight and, with the exception of the dried sewage on the bathroom linoleum one story beneath us, all is well.

Except for one small thing. There’s this hurricane about four hundred miles southeast of us and closing. The state of West Virginia has already declared a state of emergency and, while those gorgeous mountains will shield us from the worst of Isabel, we’ll still get several inches of rain tomorrow.

Rain backs up sewers.

I put on my blue fuzzy bathrobe as the LED lights on the electric clock read 5:30 a.m. East Coast time. My body thinks it’s back in California; subtract three hours and my cerebral cortex says it’s the middle of the night. I can’t sleep.

My mother is awake, preparing for the day. I stumble into the brightly lit kitchen, blinking. The dog is here. He’s a blonde Labrador retriever named T.J. His full name is Tigger Junior, if you want to be formal about it. He’s a fat-ass dog, about twenty pounds overweight. His vast dog posterior blubbers wobbily from side to side if you gently push it with your tube-sock foot, and he will loll up at you, drooling, sainting you within his canine religion.

Mom is making four sandwiches, two cheese, two turkey. “H’maam,” I say, blinking. My head is spinning.

Mom says, “Good morning, you didn’t have to get up.”

“What are you making all those sandwiches for?”

“Well, two are for me, and two are for the dog.”

“Which two are for the dog?”

“The cheese sandwiches.”

Om mane padme om, om mane padme om. I cannot comprehend, for I am washed in waves of jet lag. A bastion has been crossed, a river divided: my mother now makes sandwiches for the dog. Shantih shantih shantih.

Establishing shot: the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. The high-speed, glass-walled elevator rockets upward, bearing a square-jawed businessman (me) and my amiable Japanese friend and boss, Nozawa. As the elevator shoots past the sixth floor, we accelerate to thirty feet per second, to two hundred and fifty feet above the glass ceiling. Nozawa turns around, sees the world spin away from him, and utters a single syllable: “Oh–”

As we leave the elevator on the twenty-fifth floor, he confides, “Frankly talking, I don’t like height.”

In my room, with the curtains open. The LA foothills, burning red and gold on the horizon behind the skyscrapers. I imagined swimming pools and movie stars, and thought of Heather, somewhere on the skyline. I called her on the cell. She’s moving into her apartment; she recently bought four hundred dollars’ worth of groceries, only to find the gas hasn’t been turned on, so she can’t cook any food. “We’re having fish tacos,” she said. “I had kind of a breakdown from moving all my stuff, but I’m better now. Over the past hour and a half, I’ve assembled a lamp,” she said. “I’m very proud of myself.”

I had dinner with Nozawa at the steak house at the top of the Bonaventure. We talked about our families. “My father was born in 1930,” he said. “He was eleven during the World War Second.” I looked over a couple tables and saw a middle-aged academic fellow tapping on a laptop. I recognized the software he was using. He was writing a teleplay.

Nozawa and I checked out of the Bonaventure and visited several potential customers: game publishers, producers, and assorted rock stars. The LA fog burned off early in the afternoon, so I pointed at our rented Mustang and told Nozawa, “I have an idea.” I took the convertible top down and drove him down 405 to San Juan Capistrano. California put on her best urban face for us, with palm trees and golden hills and blue skies and open carpool lanes. Nozawa smiled the entire time. Toward the end of the trip, he announced happily, “I have never ridden a car like this before.”

There are some incredibly beautiful people down here. In San Francisco, video game developers are all staffed by standard-issue geeks, dressed in blue jeans and freebie pre-printed T-shirts. In Los Angeles there is a very high percentage of day-job actresses working as HR people and receptionists and the like in game development companies. The rules of Mendelian inheritance cannot permit so many blonde people to exist in such a diverse population.

Flight back, 8:00 pm tonight. The plane was nearly empty. I guess people remembered where they were two years ago before deciding not to buy tickets today.

My wife has discovered her hair. For fourteen years, by Amanda’s own admission, she’s maintained the same hair style — long, straight, with a subtle natural wave, down to the middle of her back. She frequently receives compliments on how pretty it is. Amanda goes to get a haircut, usually at Supercuts, every four to six months. Then, two weeks ago, we had the Conversation:

“Well, sweetie, I do like your hair very much, but it is a tad long.”

“Yes, perhaps I do need a trim. I’ll have an inch or two taken off.”

“Actually, sweetie, it’s just that your hair has gotten to a length that it’s not very flattering to you –”

“I’m not willing to spend thirty minutes in the morning making myself look the part of the well-maintained chick. It’s just not worth it. I want to shower in the morning and go to work. Can you not accept that?”

“You’re misunderstanding me. All I’m saying is that your hair is a tad long –”

Amanda and I really don’t disagree very often, but this somehow escalated into an Issue. She refused to even consider a hairstyle which made her invest more than a few minutes in the morning to maintain, and she thought that I was demanding such a hairstyle.

Then I sent her to Dee Morrissey at Studio Nove. Dee is the hairdresser in residence at the Hillbarn. She tweaked my boring shit-brown locks into the racy curls of the Undead Hot Lover from Hell when I played Dracula there. And she tweaked out Tiffany Cherevko’s straight blonde tresses into wild, elegant twists of gold. Dee’s definitely your hair connection.

Amanda came back, looking a bit chastised, with a smooth and fashionable straight cut, correctly layered. Dee had decided to curl her hair a bit at the front with a curling iron. Amanda cautioned me: “It’ll never look like this again. I’ll never invest that much time to make it look like this again.”

Then something happened. My wife, somehow, jumped on the Hair Bandwagon. That weekend, she went right out and bought hot curlers, conditioner, de-frizzer, de-bouncer, some bouncer in case the de-bouncer de-bounces too much, and a funky super professional hairspray.

Before we partied on Saturday night, she spent half an hour in the bathroom straightening her hair — she came out looking slick and lovely.

And last night, she spent an hour of quality time with her hair in curlers. When she pulled them out, in her white loose tank top and bare midriff, I flashed back to being seven years old and watching Valerie Bertinelli on “One Day At A Time.”

She’s my wife, you know. I don’t really give a shit whether her hair is long or short or straight or curlicued whatever the hell she does with it. I love her. She is the one.

But, you see, there’s this little thing. When I was seven years old, I fell in love with Valerie Bertinelli.

By the end of 2001, I weighed 207 pounds and hated the shape of my body. Today I weigh 180 pounds and am still in the process of losing weight. I don’t starve myself, I don’t abuse myself, and I haven’t used drugs in order to accomplish this weight loss.

There is a billion dollar industry in the United States built on the dreams of fat people to be thin. Turn on any late-night television and you’ll see endless commercials for weight-loss chemicals and sit-up machines and cross-trainers and a bunch of other bizarre stuff. Intuitively you probably know that all this stuff either doesn’t work very well or doesn’t work at all. So why do these companies remain in business?

The fact is that it’s very easy to make money off people who want to be thin.

It’s very easy to make money based on people’s dreams. Everyone in the United States wants to be thin and beautiful. Look on any magazine stand and you’ll see very thin, very healthy-looking beautiful people. They have perfect teeth and perfect bodies. The part the magazines don’t show is that these models spend a major part of their lives preparing their bodies to look like that! We see the results and we don’t see the process.

And here’s the key difference between my process and whatever other fad diets or pills or powders you’ve taken in the past…

You didn’t pay anything to read this.

I’m not going to try to sell you anything. I don’t want your money. I don’t want to make a fifteen-percent commission off anything. Send your money to someone else!

The unifying theme of all modern fad diets is that they charge fees for fancy caffeine pills or concentrated juices or bad medical advice. I’m not going to charge you anything, ever, not now, not in the future, for this information.

Consider that the next time you pay good money to fail on yet another fad diet.

The modern American diet is steeped in fats, from the pounds of French fries we consume to the chocolate shakes and fried chicken and cheese pizzas. Fast food is a terrible source of fat in the American diet and, on my plan, you’re going to have to be damn careful when you eat out to count fat. It IS possible to eat out, but it’s going to be necessary to count everything you do.

Here are the key elements to my plan:

• Exercise moderately six of seven days for at least forty-five minutes.

• Track all your protein, fat, carbohydrate grams, exercise, and daily weight in a daily personal log.

• Eat when you get hungry, not after. Five or six small meals a day is reasonable.

• Emphasize protein, track carbohydrates, and eliminate fats.

• Reduce or eliminate alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs to “one per week.”

• Lose weight slowly but consistently, one or two pounds per week.

• Deal correctly with guilt.