A CAREER TRACK THAT STRETCHES PAST 'RETIREMENT'.

I'M USUALLY THE FIRST person to arrive at work, and I begin with The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. And I may peruse them throughout the day. I spend quite a bit of time on the Internet-news sites mainly.

I get the best news coverage from newspapers, the next best from newsmagazines or maybe TV. When I go to news sites on the Internet, it's usually CNN and I might check the Times and Post sites. I'll go there to find things that have happened, but I won't learn much there. Internet news of almost any kind is the proverbial mile wide and inch deep.

I don't surf the Web much, but I'll go to eBay because I'm interested in railroad-employee timetables. Right now I've got Merrill Lynch open, and I look at Yahoo Finance. And a rail-fan site called Trainorders.com.

I can go a whole week and never see TV-well, not quite. I like to watch at least one of the evening news shows. But you see all that advertising for drugs for older people, and you say, "Wow, what a dying business network news is.'' I spend a fair amount of time on the Internet at home, where we're wireless-answering a lot of e-mail, working on free-lance stories about railroading. I do a fair amount of shopping online; I just bought Amtrak tickets today. I'll buy gifts and technology items online, and I buy a lot of music. I read a lot of books, and probably half of them are from Amazon. I do all my banking online-I can't imagine going back to writing checks.

I subscribe to Time, The Atlantic Monthly, Trains and Model Railroader. The newspaper age is gone, the magazine age is in question, but there are still good ones-the quality of magazine journalism has never been better. Not watching much TV, I don't really multitask much, but my wife does. She'll be sitting on the couch with her laptop looking at e-mail while watching TV. And my son's in his bedroom doing homework watching TV, and my daughter's in the den doing her homework watching TV.

We have two landlines; I resisted cellphones for a while and I don't use them that much, but now every member of my family has a cellphone, and my wife has three-one being a BlackBerry and all provided through her work as an attorney for Pfizer. I don't have a BlackBerry. The e-mail I get is not all that urgent. I see all these people who are going to ruin their thumbs answering BlackBerry e-mail. For cellular service, I have Verizon and my wife has Cingular.

It has never been in my mind that I was being controlled by the media, or that advertisers were controlling what I saw. I don't feel overwhelmed by ads; I like ads. I'm not an enemy of advertising anywhere, even on TV-I grant them the right to interrupt their programming. I just wish they didn't do it so often in pro football.

I have a lot of interests in life, and in the years ahead I probably could just become a vegetable and retire and say, "That's it, pal.'' But I can't see doing that. On the other hand, some baby boomers want to work full time until they die, but that wouldn't describe me. I love to write, I love to report and I'd like to do that some. Maybe become a greeter at Wal-Mart.