In my circle, some people know James Smith as an actor who has appeared in several of my plays over the past 15 years, including “The Size of Pike,” “Happy Fun Family,” “Safehouse,” “Animals,” and probably a few more. My students this semester at USC know him as one of the actors who made a guest appearance in my Survey class last month to read their scenes. (Some people may know him as the bartender at the Black Cat Inn in Absecon, NJ, but that’s a different James Smith.)

I’m now thinking that more people are going to know him as the pitchman of a post-apocalyptic console game. (Which my son and I, coincidentally, are playing.)

My wife called me tonight from work to share a story. She’s a respiratory therapist at our local hospital, where she does things most of us don’t even want to consider, like resuscitating patients, monitoring respiration levels, giving breathing treatments, and exchanging your blood gases. I have only a vague idea what the latter is, but I do know that if I’m going to exchange my blood gases, I’d rather my body do it on its own. I’m sure you feel the same. Often over the course of her career she was assisted patients who have no idea what she’s doing, because these patients are comatose, unconscious, or otherwise not fully in control of their faculties, as with Alzheimer’s patients. Still, she talks to all of them — you never know when one of them is going to come to.

Tonight she said she was giving some sort of life-saving treatment to an old woman with Alzheimer’s who didn’t seem conscious. Something came on the television in the room about Barack Obama, and Valorie, talking aloud as usual to a patient she was sure couldn’t respond, made some comment. “I sure hope he wins,” said a weak voice. It was the old woman, suddenly responsive, catching Valorie by surprise.

“Do you like him?” Valorie asked.

The old lady said, “Oh, yes,” and then once Obama was off the screen she drifted back to wherever she normally resides.

So who knows? Maybe he is a miracle worker.

A few thoughts before closing out this month:

1. I’ve always loved Halloween. So much so that my wife and I got married on Halloween (as I wrote about here last year).  Yes, today is our 21st wedding anniversary. I think that Halloween is growing (and, it’s spreading around the globe, a phenomenon I noticed last week in Amsterdam with the opening of the sort of Halloween-specific stores you see across the U.S.). Tonight my wife predicted we wouldn’t have any trick-or-treaters because we hadn’t had any by 6:30; for reasons I couldn’t understand, she seemed to think the annual attendance at our door has been dropping, while I’ve seen precisely the opposite phenomenon. Usually I take the kids trick-or-treating and she stays home and hands out candy. This year our roles were reversed because I couldn’t be sure I could make it around the back with my locked and angry lower back. I counted the number of trick-or-treaters. We had 129. Is that more? Fewer? I don’t know, but it seemed like  a healthy number. Over the course of the night, all but three had costumes; those three were teenagers (they didn’t come as a group), and when I asked where their costume was, to a person they said, “I’m wearing it” or “This is it.” At least they were bold about it. Later, after I’d had some of the natural medicine my mother continues to prescribe (we call that “liquor”), I asked where the best yard shows were and my wife and daughter took me to three just a couple blocks’ walk away. They were fantastic. One was a pirate ship with assorted undead mateys and a tentacled captain working it; one was a chop shop manned by ghouls; and one was an accident site where someone had been accidentally decapitated. At that one I said, “Another FEMA emergency shelter!” Everyone laughed knowingly.

2. For our anniversary, I got my wife “Torchwood,” Season 2. (I got her diamond earrings for Valentine’s Day, okay?) She was thrilled. She got me a massage for my back, scheduled for tomorrow. I am thrilled.

3. The past few days Senator Obama has been in the news lowering expectations — not just about the odds of his  success, but also about the daunting challenges facing the next president “whoever that might be.” I think that’s wise. He has run on hope, but no one should hope that he has a magic wand. If he wins, that first year will be disappointing. Of course, if he loses, I think the next four years will be vastly more disappointing.

See you next month. Starting with those long-promised photos from Amsterdam and the marathon.

When last we tuned in here, I was happily working on my play, although noting that while washing the dog I had somehow thrown out my back.

Since then, several things have happened — but not one of them has seemed notable compared to the pain in my back. It is a locked and angry mass, like a Lovecraftian horror trying to enter our world.

Sunday night after reading to my 6-year-old, I had to ask him to gently shove me off his bed and onto my feet because I couldn’t get up. Thinking it some sort of new game, he was delighted to comply.

On Monday morning I struggled to reach the phone from my bed to call someone — anyone — to help me get up. I couldn’t get the phone. Then I called for one of my kids to come help; none came. Finally I tried to shove myself off the bed and onto my feet, applying the methodology employed by my 6-year-old, but with my own hand rather than his feet. That worked. Once I was up, I was somewhat mobile, but over the course of the day gravity compacted the problem until I strongly considered calling out from my class. It’s team-taught, and my three colleagues could have divvied up my section of eight students among themselves, but since I had missed the previous Monday by dint of being in Amsterdam, that didn’t seem fair. Somehow I was able to lurch down to USC and walk around campus in a manner I hope was not reminiscent of Steve Martin in “All of Me.” Late that night, I soaked in a hot tub filled with Batherapy crystals. In my experience, there are two all-powerful cures: soaks in Batherapy Mineral Bath Salts, or doses of the miracle drug NyQuil. Once you know which to use for what, pretty much everything is covered. Both have the added benefit of helping people (even me, sometimes) sleep.

Tuesday morning I couldn’t get out of bed, so my wife took our kids to school. I did finally have to get up to give a speech at noon to a local service organization. I soaked further in Batherapy first, which helped enormously if briefly. On the way to the speaking engagement I thought about my speech and my back, not in that order. Later that night, my wife extracted the electric heating pad from whatever crevice of the house it’s hidden in and plugged it in downstairs for me. I lay on the couch and watched something (and no, I have no idea what it was) and thought about my back.

I would say yesterday was a blur, but it was more of a throb. I got up, barely, at the unconscionable hour of 6 a.m. to attend a conference in Beverly Hills. The conference featured a succession of speakers with unrelentingly bad economic forecasts. Now I was thinking about my back and the economy. When I finally couldn’t sit there any longer I left early (also, so I wouldn’t have to sit in crawling traffic). I found that my daughter had now laid out the electric heating pad and switched it on high; this was becoming a ritual. She and I watched the first half of a movie about the brothers Van Gogh, “Vincent and Theo,” directed by Robert Altman. When Theo kisses the ankle of his fiancée, my daughter, aged 10, covered her eyes, then ran up into the kitchen to inform her mother. My wife said, “If she’s too embarrassed to watch that, maybe it’s inappropriate.” I could only imagine what my wife thought was happening in this PG-13 movie, but didn’t have the energy to shout up there that it was just ankle-kissing. I wondered if the source of Vincent’s mania was an aching back.

Today I explained to everyone everywhere, “I’m crabby. Just so you know. Not at you – at everything. My back is killing me.” I shared this with the guy at the Apple Store trying to figure out why none of my contacts would synch from my laptop to my iPhone since my return from Europe. Except in his case, when I got back to my office and found out definitively that his fix had not worked, it was him I was crabby with, not just the back. Apple Store “genius” Michael fixed some of the problem; true genius elder son Lex fixed the rest. (“Genius” Michael: “They give us 15 minutes to fix each iPhone problem. This one has taken me an hour and forty-five minutes! This is the most complicated problem I’ve ever dealt with.” Me, acidly: “Congratulations. You’ve scaled new heights of achievement.”) When I got home to watch the remaining half of “Vincent and Theo,” my two younger kids fought over who would get to set the electric heating pad for me, and how high.

Now I’ve been invited by my marathon training pack to join them for an eight-mile run this Sunday. It’s tempting. I never had a bit of back problem while in training, or afterward. It was washing the dog that did this, and I’m doing my best not to resent her for it. As my pace group leader emailed me, “Don’t wash the dog.” So I may join them on Sunday, and I may get those marathon and Amsterdam photos up on this blog. If I can get out of bed.

I think I’m back into my regular swing of things: Last night I stayed up drinking whiskey and smoking a cigar while working on my play, “Troubled Men.” Whiskey, cigar, writing = normalcy.

Then this morning I did not have to get up at 6:06 a.m. (or earlier!) to train for the marathon. Why not? Because I had already done the marathon! So I woke up at 11 a.m. — that seems to be the time my body wants to wake up. (Or later.) This was the first time since May I didn’t get up early on Sunday.

At the same time, I’m going to stick with running on my own during the week (although probably at night). And I’ve checked the AIDS marathon site no fewer than five times in the past week to see when they’re going to post more upcoming marathons. So, unlike how I felt while I was doing the marathon, I guess I won’t be giving away all my running stuff.

How is it possible to run a marathon with no ill effect, and then throw out your back by washing the dog?

Watch this.

Today was museum and tour day for me here in Amsterdam. I have some great — or at least interesting! — shots and insights to post over the next few days, including photos taken during the grueling Nordic marathon. (I can see why the Dutch are so carefree about creature comforts — if I lived in this climate, I’d do anything possible to warm up too.)

In the meantime, here’s a picture I took of Vincent Van Gogh today at his museum. Actually, it’s a picture of Vincent’s picture of Vincent.

No, I’m not doing anything clever with perspective, the way Vincent often did — I’m just trying to get the placque in the photo as well. Which I did. But it isn’t legible. The iPhone takes pretty good pictures of pictures, but not-so-good pictures of placques.

(By the way, the instant after I took this (non-flash) photo, I felt a light tapping on my left arm and turned around to see a warm-eyed guard tut-tutting me off taking any more. By contrast, some iron maiden of a guard in the Rijksmuseum later that day just about tore off the arm of an unfortunate guy who wandered too close to a cannon preserved from the 80 years’ war with Spain. She pointed down to a warning sign on the floor that asked patrons to keep their distance. “Can you read that? Hah?” she snapped, her eyes squirting blood out of her skull. If I had been that guy I would have said, “No, because I’m accidentally standing on it.”)

But back to Vincent. It was undeniably thrilling to see these paintings up close and in person.  I don’t have much to add to that.

Afterwards, I had lunch in Vincent’s cafeteria. The food was excellent. I’ve been doing my best to have Dutch food while I’m here — and by “Dutch,” I don’t mean McDonald’s, or Burger King, or KFC, which now ring the Dam. I mean plates I can barely pronounce, and sometimes can’t identify. Later that night I had something I believe was called Pruttlepot or Puttlepot, or maybe even Pootie-Poot, which turned out to be a stew of beef with apples and mashed potatoes, with some vegetables somehow baked in the same dish along side, with several side dishes in their own serving bowls.

Here was my lunch (or what remains of it) at the Van Gogh:

That’s a bottle of appelsap (or apple juice — I just like saying appelsap), and the bag from a packet of paprika-flavored Lay’s potato chips. Unseen:  some sort of raw fish sandwhich that was excellent and which I’d already consumed. What I like about this (other than the word appelsap) and why I took the picture is the bag of paprika-flavored potato chips. I love finding these regional variations on American-branded foods. In London nine years ago I first noted that curry is a condiment choice at McDonald’s, but the true discovery was the 10 or so variations of American potato chips — except in meat flavors. There were bacon-flavored potato chips, and beef flavored potato chips, and probably mutton-flavored ones as well. Why is paprika favored in the Netherlands? And is paprika derived from red peppers, as intimated on this bag? Or do the Dutch define “paprika” differently than we do, and as the British do with bacon? (Just as the Eskimos are reputed to have hundreds of different words for snow, the British so prize eating the pig that there are differentiations for “bacon” (which we would call “ham”), “crispy bacon” (which we would call “bacon”), “gammon” (which I guess we would call “fatty ham” and then either trim or throw out) and probably a couple more I’ve forgotten.)

There was no mention, by the way, anywhere in the museum as to what Vincent ate. And I doubt that he could have afforded lunch in his own museum, let alone the price of admission.

If you’ve run a marathon and you still can’t sleep, that’s pretty bad.

I completed the 26.2 mile (42 kilometer) Amsterdam marathon. Yes, my time was something like 12 days, 6 minutes — but I completed. More details — and photos — tomorrow. Right now it’s time for steak and beer, and bed.