Columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
From the New York Times, Time magazine, and the complete Chicago Tribune syndicated columns
I am very fond of my current age, the age at which I no longer recognize the names of famous celebrities and when I go to YouTube to hear the songs of my youth I see commercials for walkers and stool softeners — and of the classmates who stood in our blue gowns on the football field that June day and were urged to go make the world a better place, a majority have slipped away into the hereafter.
And yet certain glories are more glorious than ever. A summer day, for one. I took summer for granted in my casual youth and now, grinding away at work all morning at my desk, I step outside into a Manhattan heaven, festive cliff dwellers stream through Central Park, the city is golden, and an old achy man feels it in his soul because today he skipped the newspaper, which is a catalog of decline, despair, and dereliction, and he is getting bulletins from the passing crowd that Americans are as free and brave as ever.
Read MoreEvery morning when I swing my legs out of bed and stand erect and think a clear thought, which is: Thank you, dear Lord, for this day, and I insert my hearing aids and switch them on using an app on my phone and thus gain access to spoken English, this magnificent language of my people that emerged from our defeat in 1066 to the Normans, which then enriched our blunt Teutonic tongue with words such as literature and music and passion and coffee, all of which are part of my day, and I think, “I am 83 and truly this is the happiest time of my life, it simply is so, and so don’t deny it,” but then I try to find something worrisome such as the dog I saw in Central Park with a thing in its mouth like what babies suck on, which I racked my brain trying to think of the name for and had to google on my phone to find it — pacifier — which led to thinking about Cognitive Decline Due To Aging and the billion-dollar industry in beverages and supplements that claim to delay decline and Decline, my dears, is an idea that once planted in the brain is not easily dispelled, it stays with you as you amble to the kitchen and take your meds and pour a cup of coffee and you have to sit down and get a grip on yourself and get your head on straight.
I left St. Paul ten years ago and moved to New York. I was a big shot in St. Paul and in New York I am squeezed into the C train along with everyone else. My wife loves New York and is happy here, and living with a happy woman is much much more important than being a big shot. I’ve started a new career as a stand-up comic and it’s great fun to amuse people, most of whom, due to their taking citizenship seriously, lack goofiness in their lives.
Read MoreI’ve just had an amazing weekend in New York, which is what people come to New York for, to experience life in ways they didn’t find likely in Anoka, Minnesota. I love Anoka but it has its limits.
My weekend: Friday I was writing a book, and that night my love and I went to see “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway. Saturday, I worked. I got a call from my doctor saying the CT scan showed that my right hip wasn’t broken when I fell on it but only had a huge hematoma that would ache for a few weeks, and that night we went to a wedding of a friend’s daughter at the famous Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street and a dinner and dancing that followed. A hundred guests, and I looked around as the DJ started spinning the discs with a walloping bass beat I could feel in my butt and I was the oldest person in the room at 83 and I was in a state of delight and started swaying and twisting with my love. Sunday, I slept until 12:30 p.m.
Read MoreI did a show in Chicago last week and I’m sorry you weren’t there because it was so fabulously good. I’m from Minnesota and was brought up not to say that but I’m 83 and it’s time to take liberties. I was also brought up to tell the truth, so there. I’ve started a new career as a stand-up comic. My mother, who has departed this world, loved comedians even though she was brought up Brethren, and I used to tell her jokes and when she laughed it made me feel loved. And the Chicago audience laughed like crazy. They came to have a good time and I didn’t get in their way by talking about politics and after ninety minutes they gave me a standing ovation and we all went home.
I do the show standing-up but it’s not all jokes and I avoid snark and sarcasm — I think irony is for teenagers. I believe that life is a gift and that our existence here on this planet is a miracle and I am grateful for it. Grateful for the innovations such as Earl Grey ice cream and search engines, online newspapers, the urinal that flushes when I step back and for the fact that I can say, “Alexa, play the Rolling Stones’ ‘Brown Sugar’” and she does, no need to dig through the shelf of LPs. I could find the Rolling Stones on YouTube but then I’d have to sit through commercials for retirement homes, energy drinks, and stool softeners.
Read MoreDriving through northern Iowa last week, the flattest farmland in America, I thought of my Uncle Jim and the old Keillor farm I loved as a kid, the big barn and haymow, The cows he milked by hand twice a day, the horses Prince and Ned who pulled the hayrack, a magical place for a boy. My dad, who grew up on that farm, hated it because he saw it as perpetual poverty. He was eager to make a break and start over. He was not nostalgic. I am but I was only a visitor.
It was dramatic to drive for hundreds of miles and see no barns or silos, no windmill or grove around a farmhouse, the Grant Wood landscape of rural America, and see what corporate industrial agriculture looks like. It looks like Siberia. A place you send people as punishment.
Read MoreOn the road last week, doing one-nighters, living the motel life, which is a good life, though it does raise questions in a man’s mind, such as, “When did America decide to wrap paper cups in plastic? And why?” I’m an old man and I remember when your motel room came with two coffee cups, ceramic, unwrapped, next to the coffeemaker, or a stack of paper cups. Maybe two glasses in the bathroom. Was there a wave of motel cup poisoning back in the Nineties that led to this plastic protectivity? And if so, why do they not put plastic covers on the motel scrambled-egg breakfast?
The plastic film I peel off a paper cup for coffee turns my mind in a direction I don’t want, and instead of thinking about my beloved wife and lighthearted daughter and what I might do this evening to amuse the audience coming to see an old man with a microphone, I think about microplastic pollution, a planet that absorbs 40 million tons of it every year, plastic in the trees, water, the ice in the Antarctic, in my brain, pollution created by powerful corporate interests — men in tailored suits who own three homes have persuaded my motels to plastic-wrap cups and they don’t care about science, only profitability.
Read MoreI went walking around Central Park Sunday, 843 acres of paradise in the middle of the metropolitan grid; that always makes a person feel good because it contradicts all you read about AI, alienation, angst, atrophy of the arts, urban disaffection and antagonisms — you walk among flocks of different individuals being themselves and also enjoying flocks of dissimilars in passing, a parade of heterogenuflecting homogenuineness, joggers each jogging to their own drumbeat, dogs towing their people, papas pushing babies in strollers, little princesses, cool kids on scooters, elders freed from their four walls, everybody talking, phrases flying past — I don’t see why — I told her, Don’t — it’s nice the blue jay is pretty because it’s a mean bird and the shriek — and for me, a writer from a family of separatist evangelicals who brought me up to avoid the worldly, it is a Carnival of Humanity, it is a feast, everybody is cheerful, how could they be otherwise?
A few minutes before, I was on the phone with a friend having a dour conversation about all the usual things people my age bemoan and beweep, and now I was in a timeless scene of happiness that E.B. White would’ve enjoyed, A.J. Liebling, W.B. Yeats, J.F. Powers, J.D. Salinger, or H.D. My Grandma Dora would’ve felt at home here, her grandfather David Powell who went West in the silver rush of 1859, his wife, Martha Ann, whose father was an English seaman who jumped ship in Baltimore and avoided being hanged and took up farming in Pennsylvania.
Read MoreI’m at the age when you learn more about medicine than you had intended to, such as a T.I.A. or “transient ischemic attack” or what I call “temporary idiotic agitation,” which recently happened to me, the sudden inability of even a published author to speak a simple declarative sentence, which is embarrassing, like suddenly wetting your pants.
Of course much of what you learn about medicine is good, such as noninvasive surgery: a doctor can rearrange body parts leaving such a tiny scar that your swimwear modeling career will hardly be interrupted. Injuries that once would’ve landed you in a rocking chair by the fireplace to peruse National Geographics in your twilight years — now physical therapists put you through your paces to make you nimble, supple, and adroit. And the best news: a study at Harvard shows there is no connection between a healthy lifestyle and longevity.
Read MoreGetting old is an adventure and what, I ask you, is life without adventure? And an adventure that is planned such as a canoe trip or the ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro is nothing compared to one that happens to you suddenly such as what happened to me Sunday at Bethel, New York.
I was on tour with Sam the road manager and the pianist Rich Dworsky and we’d done six terrific shows — even I, the naysayer, thought they were good — and were headed to do the seventh and last at a nearby venue on the site of the 1969 Woodstock Festival, which according to some accounts was an iconic week in the saga of my generation and according to some people I knew who were there was a miserable few days of loud music, rain, bad drugs, and chaos, a crowd of almost a half million that had been planned for a crowd of fifty thousand. Janis Joplin sang and Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and I’d written a parody of CSNY’s “Teach Your Children” for it.
Read MoreMy new career as a stand-up is more fun than the old one in broadcasting for the simple reason that the audience is right there in front of me and it’s very clear when I connect and when I don’t.
Comedy is intimate. You poke them right, they laugh, it isn’t a conceptual problem. AI can create what sounds like jokes but they’re not funny. AI is going to take over banking and politics long before it takes over comedy.
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