A few last words about the MAGA man

Minnesota used to be a state where if a man with a badge knocked on your door at 3:30 a.m., you’d open it and after last week’s shootings we may be considering various alternatives. Do we all need to purchase firearms? Will Apple develop a cop-detector and Siri will tell you he or she is legit? Or maybe a tranquilizer dart you shoot with a peashooter?

Will legislators and other public officials make their addresses known? Will they need to serve under pseudonyms such as X12 or YME while housed in a secure cellblock facility? Will their children need to change their names and live with foster parents? My suggestion is that we hire Canadians to legislate and adjudicate; their country seems to be running well, why not import experts?

The link between language and gunshots

Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were shot and killed in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, a mile from where I grew up, where my dad built a house in 1947 and he and Mother raised six children. Sen. John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were shot north of there in Champlin, across the river from Anoka where I was born. My nephew and his wife and kids live in the house Dad built and after the shootings they locked themselves in the house and tried to stay calm.

I sat in New York, watching state officials express shock, horror, resolve to catch the perpetrator, grief for the families, and I thought of the peaceful suburb I knew, houses on acre lots with big gardens, kids walking to school, the Mississippi a stone’s throw away, skating on it in the winter. And I felt that more needed to be said than shock and resolve.

I feel strangely elated

I feel strangely elated about the Prairie Home Companion shows coming up this week, think they may be the best we’ve ever done, which is odd for an almost-83-year-old guy to think, plus which I’m a Minnesotan and elation doesn’t come naturally to us.

On the road doing comedy

I was on a long car trip, Atlanta to Nashville to St. Louis to Chicago, doing my stand-up comedy act this week, and in St. Louis came the horrible video of the jetliner going down in Ahmedabad, crashing into the medical college, the pilot’s Mayday cry of “I have no thrust,” the horrific death toll, one passenger surviving, and I sat backstage at the club, asking myself, “Do I mention this tragedy?” It seems perverse to ignore it but sort of sanctimonious to mention it — and how do I do it? Say a prayer? Ask for a moment of silence. And how to make a bridge from the elegiac to the jokes, which is what the customers came for. So I went out and did my act. Life is precarious and so we should be grateful and I will show my gratitude by making people laugh.

I took up gratitude some years ago when Dr. Dearani at Mayo replaced a valve in my heart and I went for a walk down the hall the next morning, thinking about my aunt and uncles who died in their 50s from the same congenital malfunction. I had come to the end of my life expectancy and was operating on gift time. It had nothing to do with good diet and exercise, it was about fine technology. I’m a writer, I’m not sure I could sew a patch on a pair of jeans. And on that walk, I gave up satire and snark and the fine art of spitballing the pretentious solemnity of poohbahs and solipsists and turned to the adoration of competence and ingenuity and nobility. This is a good strategy especially during the reign of America’s first utterly corrupt president. Pay him mind and he will wear you out and make you feel hopeless about the country. I choose not to be.

Whistler and Rembrandt and Trump

I am not surprised about the rift that occurred between me and Donald Trump, I always knew that his friendships are measured in months and though he said beautiful things about me, called me the Greatest American Writer in History, and he appointed me head of the Department of Government Empathy and I taught him how to tell a joke, which he had never done before, how to hug a small child without terrifying it, how to limit his use of the First Person Singular and try to Decapitalize Key Words and Phrases. I tried to talk him out of the 51st State, the Gulf of America, Alcatraz, the idea that opposition to Israeli policy is antisemitic. And so, for him to order my deportation showed poor judgment and I dropped the bomb and during Pride Month I showed pictures of Don and his Big Beautiful Bill. Everyone in the White House knew he had a boyfriend and suddenly they were in panic mode.

But unlike him, I have a life. I was in a cab on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan heading for a meeting and I told the cab driver 730 and he thought I said 73rd and stopped there and I knew it was wrong but my phone rang and it was my grandson who’d come to town with his girlfriend the day before and I was making plans with him on the phone while pulling out my Visa card to pay the cabfare and I opened the door, watching for fast electric delivery bikes in the bike lane and I got out, and realized I’d left my billfold on the seat of the cab and I yelled but a Harley roared past and my grandson was alarmed but I assured him I was okay and I stood there in bright sunlight, dazed, realizing I hadn’t asked for a receipt so I didn’t know the cab number and all my money was in the billfold, plus ID and credit cards, which was a shock but there was nothing to be done, and I called my wife and got voicemail and remembered that she was going to the Frick Museum on Fifth Avenue and 70th, and I headed that way.

A June morning, assessing the situation

June is here, the sun shines, the birds sing, and I feel the mood lift probably because we’re spending a week in rural Connecticut with no Times landing at the front door every morning. Ecclesiastes says, “Whoever increases knowledge increases sorrow” and that certainly has been true of the Times front page this year. With a very active adolescent president, it’s good to take a break to restore one’s belief in human progress.

Of course the country is deeply divided. This week the Supreme Court declined to take up Maryland and Rhode Island’s ban on AR-15 semi-automatic rifles, which are legal in most states. I don’t know anybody who owns one and if a friend of mine showed me his AR-15 I’d feel funny about him, same as if he showed me his collection of photographs of corpses.

Let’s join together, people, and hold hands

The world is advancing at a rapid pace and it’s hard to keep up. Last weekend, I learned about a liquid hand soap that smells like fresh-cut grass, an Earl Grey ice cream, and an app that when you snap a picture of a tree with your phone, it will tell you it’s a catalpa and the bird singing in it is a tufted titmouse.

Earl Grey is a tea, not an ice cream, just as Jim Clothes is what it is and would you make ice cream that tastes of perspiration?

Underwood man confronts an algorithm

The most infuriating website in the country is Amtrak’s and buying a one-way ticket from Manhattan to Old Saybrook the other day brought me to the verge of pulling out a pistol and blowing the laptop to pieces but I don’t own a pistol and there’s a decent novel in the hard drive, but I was seriously irked. But it’s good to be irked, good for the heart, good for the disposition. Calm is greatly overrated as an attitude. I’ve suffered from an excess of it for years.

The infuriation, of course, was my fault. I am a museum piece from back in the manual typewriter era, tapping on an Underwood, a handsome machine now found in antique stores and journalism schools in impoverished countries. I haven’t punched Underwood keys since I was in my twenties. I still like to take a good pen and a yellow legal pad and sit and write. I believe there’s a circuit between hand and eye that can produce sentences more elegant than the one I’m typing now on a laptop. But the laptop is my main instrument. I prefer it for its vast ability to Delete. Using the cursor I can gray out whole passages and poking the little red dot at the top of the file I could, if I wish, make thousands of words vanish from the world without a trace and never bothering anybody ever again. There’s something heroic about doing this. You can burn a paper manuscript but nobody ever does, they accumulate and turn yellowish and wind up in an archive.

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A night at the opera, my dear

We went to see Richard Strauss’s “Salome” at the Metropolitan Opera Wednesday night, or let’s say that my love went and I went with her, she because she loves opera and I because I don’t know enough about opera to be critical, I like everything just fine. But this opera was different. Men do not come off well in “Salome,” you’ve got King Herod for one thing and Salome’s dad who is weird and scenes with lewd men and little girls that make you not want to read the subtitles. There are men wearing ram’s heads and John the Baptist chained in the dungeon and more mental illness than in most operas but it’s in German. The music has its dissonant edges but it’s gorgeous, played by the 100-piece Met orchestra. So you have weirdness and insanity set to beautiful music, Salome wandering around singing “I want to kiss his lips” after the prophet’s head has been chopped off. There’s no intermission so it’s hard to leave early.

I went to see it, in part, because my friend Ellie Dehn was covering the role of Salome in this production. “Covering” means that she learned an extremely difficult role with a lot of crazy acting and was no more than 15 minutes from the Met before each performance and was focused and ready so that if the star soprano got out of a cab and was run down by a pizza delivery guy on a bike, Ellie would rush in, put on the white gown, and do the show, hit the high notes, be insane, do the Dance of the Seven Veils, so that nobody would feel cheated. It’s an impossible job, to be up for a heroic performance, knowing that the odds of your doing it are slim to none, but the roles have to be covered. Baseball postpones, parades cancel, opera doesn’t.