What I need to do is move with a Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears in my pocket all the time. That's a possible resolution after Friday night.

I put the disc in my jacket pocket as Meghan handed it to me atop the Metro Center escalator, with her headed in the other direction and us going to see the band a month later. Met Mike and Mark in the pub for our old combination of storytelling, venting and conspiring. Mike had to go back to work, so Mark and I junked our plans for the car show and got dinner at Acadiana. Steen's cane syrup bourbon vinaigrette… the scallops and bacon pork loin were swimming, and I wanted a mainline.

Halfway through dinner, the bearded manager tapped me on the back — wait, the bearded manager was Dr. Love, he of the neighborhood, basketball and the Metro crew. He'd returned; I hadn't known, and we traded man hugs. Generously, he sent over desserts, and along with the waitress recommending a port, I walked with Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears in my pocket back to the train, frigid night, warm kid.

On the front page of today's Post, there's a story, "A drug dealer's son finds a better way to be Tony Lewis." The story is a solid, worth-it read and very deserved credit. Tony was a classmate at Gonzaga, and while my class prided itself on having membership stretching from down the street to counties away, I didn't know his family history. Doubt many others did. Everyone understood life down the street was 10x harder than counties away, but we likely couldn't imagine what 20x was like. A mini-newsie, I'd read Rayful stories but never connected the dots.

In today's story:

It wasn't until later that he realized that his dad had just been sentenced to life in prison for his role in a drug distribution network that authorities said generated more than $2 million a week at its peak. "I can remember him saying, 'I'm not going to be home for a while,' " Lewis says. "He also told me from the beginning, 'Be strong.' But it's like, what does that mean? And I created in my little mind what that meant."

It meant that as a child, Tony fought to prove himself on the streets, playing tough. It meant, as a teenager, attending Gonzaga College High School, the elite Jesuit boys' school on North Capitol Street, even though he couldn't relate to most of the students. "None of my classmates came from where I came from," he says.

It meant, as an adult, taking a series of government jobs, accepting a paycheck that amounts to a tiny fraction of what his father once raked in. In an old picture in a family album, his father leans on the hood of a new BMW. The younger Tony Lewis drives a beat-up Oldsmobile and uses a cellphone with a shattered screen.

What got the son to a place that his father would never reach was the hardened determination of his aunt and grandmother, a school that opened another world to a kid whose male role models were mostly dead or imprisoned, and a neighborhood that was becoming home to a much greater variety of people.

My only disappointment from the story is a small one. The second pic in the piece's mini-gallery, of Tony standing alone in his neighborhood, is stunning. The Post site has got to get itself an enlarge button. Let the photographs run as bold as the stories and the people inside them.

That said, who cares about enlarge buttons? Congratulations to Tony.

Side note: Is the Post secretly profiling my high school classmates one by one? Anthony Riker, profiled in November, was in a couple classes.

Around the pool.

By the barbecue.

At the market.

On the boulevard.

In the window.

Beneath the drugstore margarita machine.

Then back home.

Donnie Simpson has only appeared in this blog once, and I blame not keeping notepads in my car. Following Simpson's WPGC exit, let's talk.

Simpson was my favorite DJ, and I was sad to hear him go this week. Elliot, Jack Diamond, sorry. Simpson felt like D.C. every morning, ready for lunch at Ben's and dinner at an embassy. KYS competitor Russ Parr made his national broadcast feel like our neighborhoods. But Simpson, turning down syndication offers to stay local, made our neighborhoods feel national. Parr's approach was smart and respectful — he phoned into Simpson's final show — but Simpson had the harder path. Here in the capital, we all testified regularly to losing track of our city's scope. Simpson's success beyond entertaining was keeping our perspective.

And for sure, he entertained.

I blogged about him when he played Stairway to Heaven in its entirety — undoubtedly a D.C. urban-format first — panicked all of WPGC, then laughed and laughed and talked more lovingly of the song than any classic-rock jock I've ever heard. Even more in my iTunes wheelhouse, he played John Legend like no one else on the city's air. He went all-out for charity, aired novelty Redskins songs, got rich without getting mean, gave Tony Perkins his start, and went out in style yesterday.

Because if you're in the avalanche, you must've had fun in the snow.

"I want to tell you / I feel hung up but I don't know why / I don't mind / I could wait forever, I've got time / Sometimes I wish I knew you well, / Then I could speak my mind and tell you / Maybe you'd understand."

I like the Beatles' I Want to Tell You almost as much for the lyrics as for the quotes about the song. "About the avalanche of thoughts that are so hard to write down or say or transmit," goes George's description from the Anthology book. "Replete with a hard and high anxiety in the lyrics that is further manifested in the musical fabric by dissonance, both harmonic and rhythmic," says the Pollack take on the song.

The solution, if we even need one, is clearly this movie.

I could tell you about the parachuting cows, the giant automated penguin, the mad scientists doing serious snowball research. I could even tell you about Cowboy, Indian and Horse, three amigos who share a two-story house way out in the sticks. But to really understand the zany and surreal comic madness of "A Town Called Panic," you're going to have to see it for yourself.

For half a year now, atop my browser at home, there's sat this link to an article, "Caulfield Preparatory Brings Us Back to School for Fall." The story is a New York magazine brief about a pricey clothing line's debut.

"Three years ago, when designer Vincent Flumiani began his new line, Caulfield Preparatory [pics], it was under the influence of J.D. Salinger and a longing to write his own story of self-discovery. The first men's collection, for fall 2009, is based on a story Flumiani wrote about a young man who runs away on various adventures around the world."

Essentially, Caulfield Prep is a clothing line for phonies. There are fake nautical touches, distressed fabrics, worn-in tees, and even removable crest patches. You can proclaim or hide your brand affiliation each day. The line would be a deliciously ironic statement were it not so serious.

I bookmarked the page to mention the clothes some day but then to talk more about my mom's old hunting hat. The hat is orange-red and has its shape somewhere between a newsboy cap and a hunting hat. I don't know where the hat is now. My guess would be in a box full of hats, stuffed animals and mini-sporting goods my brother and I liked as kids. But I do know the hat was my mom's Holden Caulfield hat.

The red hat is the first thing to leap to mind when I think of Salinger. Before the ducks, before the Glass family, before a first love's love of Esme, before the white-cover paperback that's my first and only copy of Catcher, since leaving me repulsed over any less minimalist cover of the book, when I think of Salinger, I think of pulling down the red hat.

I loved the hat as a kid and played in it. Reaching a high school class, I began to read the book, and my mom told me the hat was her Holden Caulfield hat. At fourteen years, I was stunned. My mom loved a book!

Yes, my mother was a writer. Yes, she and my dad read to me and my brother all the time growing up. Yes, she had quizzed me on spelling words while cooking dinner, let me loose at the library in summer and encouraged the wild storytelling I did then and wish I could recapture now. But this time with the hat was different. Here was a book she'd loved so much she worn it on her head. Now I got to read that book.

Read it, found it thrilling, understood it a little then and so much more later. "Kids tend to hold onto it," a high school English teacher of mine, Mr. L'Etoile, told NPR late today. "This is a book they don't sell." Friend Karen heard this as she drove in Chicago tonight and called to tell me.

In Catcher, another English teacher reminds us, the hat shows up, truly shows up, in chapters three, four, 20 and 25. "What I did was," go the first lines about the thing, "I pulled the old of my hunting hat around to the front, then pulled it way down over my eyes. That way, I couldn't see a goddam thing." On the next page, the hat isn't a deer-shooting hat, Holden jokes, it's a people-shooting hat. Far later in the story, the checkroom girl at the bar gives him his coat. "I showed her my goddam red hunting hat, and she liked it. She made me put it on before I went out, because my hair was still pretty wet. She was all right." To care…

Chapter 25, two pages from the end, I read it tonight and broke down. Holden and Phoebe rode the carousel in Central Park, and it started to rain. "Then what she did — it damn near killed me — she reached in my coat pocket and took out my red hunting hat and put it on my head."

I have yet to use the heat in my apartment this winter. I fired up the thermostat once, before the great Washington blizzard, and no warm air came out. The way the blizzard came out, the fail didn't matter. The apartment stayed warm enough. But it's a been fun experience. So, I enjoyed the Times piece recently about people who live without heat.

1. Long underwear. One man in the story mentions his uniform. During serious cold snaps, you need three layers of clothing and two layers of blankets. The hoodie's hood matters. You also hope to live somewhere without much serious cold. D.C. fairs better than locations in the story.

2. Secondary sources of heat. One man, who runs a writer's retreat called the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writer's Co-op, mentions a wood-burning stove. For me, during the rare serious cold snaps, the dryer and the shower work pretty well. And you get all your laundry done.

3. Insulation. This is the biggest source of crazy in the story and why I can't compare to its people. They live in cold, cold spots largely without insulation. My place, though, seems to steal heat from neighbors and hallways. I like to imagine the elevator rushing by helps too. Friction!

4. Pleasant alertness. Every source in the story speaks to this quality, and from my minor league status I agree. Winter can take a toll on my happiness, but it hasn't this year. There are a number of reasons for that change, but I've found active, conducive temps are underrated.

5. Love. Underplayed in the story (and in my life this winter, hey-o!) except for this great part, talking to Co-Op guy: Doesn't his girlfriend, with whom he shares a drafty attic room, get grumpy? "What makes her grumpy is using resources," he said. "We're all about staying positive."

Bonus 6. Have a hilarious coat and dog.

At this size, he isn't so suspicious. But look at the high-res version!

Can't tell you how happy I was to see the USA TODAY/Gannett Sports Philanthropy Forum happen today. I wrote the agenda back in August ("Brain dump for a sports-philanthropy summit agenda"), and it came to life today. Friend Katie was primarily responsible, the cause leader at USAT and most vital force in philanthropy at Gannett. The summit was her fourth in the space. We teamed up on developing it heading into the winter, and she, friend Alison and a host of event marketing staff drove a freight train in the last month to make it happen today.

On stage during the day: Dikembe Mutombo and Bob Lanier from the NBA, Pat LaFontaine from the NHL, cause marketing leader Carol Cone, the United Way, City of Hope, ALS Association, Special Olympics, NBA corporate, NHL corporate, the Redskins representing NFL, PGA, Fishbait (repping college coaches), a number of colleagues including fellow NU-Medill-Daily alum Christine Brennan, and digital cause evangelist Brian Reich. I have to say Brian made my morning by starting his panel with a "what's not working" question. I'd aimed the agenda at this harder edge, and we hit on real discussions throughout the day. Not bad for our first conversation on a broad, complicated topic. My hat's way off for Katie, Alison, and everyone who created and participated today.

We had more than a hundred cause/corporate leaders on hand (Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance, Nike, good2gether, Network for Good, National Breast Cancer Foundation, Komen, pro soccer leagues, American Legacy Foundation, Diabetes Association, PETA, Share Our Strength, the Corporation for National and Community Service, and so many others). You can find hundreds of tweets published at #usatspf.

This last part, I don't exactly know how to put… and didn't put when I first hit the publish button. I hate to use the words shy or introverted here because I still haven't figured how to speak to them. After close to 4,000 posts in the blog, that's too bad. But it was a good INFP day. Worked rooms, made introductions, impossible years ago, am beat.