Working my way toward a philosophy

I had a dream last night in which I was a stand-up comic and I trained a dog to move his lips as if saying words and I stood in the wings and told jokes lip-synched by him, jokes about dogs (in the first person) and the audience loved it so much, to see a dog tell jokes, that when I came out on stage they were disappointed and wanted the dog to come back and even booed me. There is a lesson here: there is such a thing as Excessive Success, which only leads to high expectations that cannot be met.

This surely was true of Sir Walter Raleigh, a poet, soldier, Queen Elizabeth’s boyfriend, who sailed up the Orinoco in search of El Dorado and failed and came back to London to be accused of treason and thrown in prison and have his head chopped off, a warning to the rest of us: don’t rise too high too fast.

A perfect Christmas, a man among woman

I got an orange, a book, four bags of jelly beans, and 12 pairs of bright red socks for Christmas, which warmed the cockles of my heart, plus which I was a lone male with three fine women companions so I didn’t need to say a word, just an occasional murmur to indicate I was paying attention. Had there been another male present, I would’ve had to talk learned talk about the economy or other topics about which I’m ignorant, which I did enough of in college and now it feels good to put a lid on it and listen to the music of contrapuntal contralto conversation.

We have no need for big gifts, being in the deaccessioning stage of life when we sit down at our big round clunky table and wonder how to divest ourselves of the thing, which was imposed on us by an interior decorator whose enthusiasm for massive ugly expensive furniture ground us into submission, we Midwesterners unable to self-advocate, so we feel we’re living in his apartment, not our own. If anyone wants the table, we’ll pay you to take it away. (It’s big so bring a chainsaw.)

A miraculous evening on Sixth Avenue

I’ve been reading Christmas letters this week and — I don’t know how to say this politely — back where I come from, Minnesota, it is considered shameful to be shameless and write a promotional brochure about your over-achieving children — “Tara was top scorer on her soccer team and won the lead role in ‘Antigone,’ and her essay on chaos theory will be in the next issue of American Scholar. She and her partner Maria whom she met in Trigonometry and who is Phi Beta Kappa from Pakistan are engaged to marry in June and plan to start a family when they move to Cambridge to start grad school.”

Probably I am all wrong about this. Probably I am simply defensive about my own slovenly habits. Probably I am envious, having never excelled in anything other than humility. I hit a brick wall in lower algebra and never got to trig. And now I’ve brought home a pitiful misshapen Christmas tree for which I paid $90. I was sent out to purchase a tree and I brought home a cripple. I had to go out and buy a special orthopedic tree stand with lead weights so it won’t fall over.

Waiting for Christmas, wishing for snow

I flew from St. Louis to New York City last Friday, had a cup of black coffee before takeoff, which put me right to sleep, and awoke on the descent through heavy overcast, no visible lights below even as our wheels were lowered, and down, down, down we came as the ride got bumpy and then sort of turbulent, lights appearing a few hundred feet below, a river of headlights on a freeway, the plane shaking as the ground came up to meet us, red lights on the tarmac, and the wheels hit and the nose came down and he reversed the engines and braked hard and brought us around to the terminal at LaGuardia.

It was thrilling. For all the times I’ve ridden a plane descending through zero visibility, it still is a pleasure, to contemplate the end of my life and then life continues, I text my love (“Landed”), take my briefcase, thank the captain standing in the cockpit door and walk up the Jetway and past Starbucks and the ATMs and the candy stand and out the door into the dark and drizzle and stand in the taxi line and hop in a cab and into Manhattan we go, down dark streets of brownstones, a few hardy souls walking their dogs, and across the Park to the West Side where my love waits for me to come through the door and puts her arms around me.

A rainy December day, long thoughts therein

I saw the phrase “friendship recession” in a headline last week, which has a musical swing to it but refers to growing social isolation, particularly among men, due to people working from home, avoiding crowded places, being reluctant joiners, and then I stopped reading because sociology has always bored me ever since I was nineteen and sat in Dr. Cooperman’s class and looked around at the girls in the room and tried to imagine how I might strike up a conversation with one of them. Talking about sociology did not seem like the way to begin.

I grew up in a family of eight who belonged to a tight group of devout evangelicals, half of them relatives, who believed in holding the secular world at arm’s length, so my parents didn’t associate much with neighbors, but of course we children did and we went to school with non-evangelical kids and so we lived in two worlds and had to keep them separate. I knew the words to “Great Balls of Fire” but didn’t sing it around my parents and I didn’t talk to my classmates about the Second Coming. I had cousins who lived on farms and used an outhouse and cooked on a wood-burning stove and I had city cousins who had flush toilets and rode the streetcar. A lot of sociology going on around me.

Novelist in room 717, recuperating

I picked up COVID last week sitting in an airport lounge, writing, and I pulled my mask down because my masked breath fogged my glasses, and now I’m holed up in a cheap hotel in Fort Lauderdale, waiting for the Paxlovid to kick in. I pass through numerous airports every month because in the comedy business, people tire of you after an exposure or two — the dog who walks into the bar and says, “How about a drink for a talking dog” and the bartender says, “Sure, the toilet’s down there, first door on the left” is not a life-changing joke — and so I keep on the move, and besides, I’m in love with my woman and want to get back to her promptly and not travel by bus. She puts her arms around me and whispers things that nobody else whispers. Sometimes TSA agents feel up my inner thighs but intimacy with a guy with a badge and blue rubber gloves doesn’t interest me.

Sick in a hotel room, thinking back

I spent the weekend in Fort Lauderdale in a low-rent hotel with many families with small children and numerous college kids who seemed confused, even alarmed, when I got on an elevator and said, “Good morning” to them, as I was brought up to do but that was back in the 20th century. Every time I crossed through the lobby I heard Christmas songs like “it’s lovely weather for a sleigh ride together with you,” which strikes a Minnesotan as peculiar and then on Sunday I tested positive for COVID so I had other things to think about.

I have the good fortune to be related to a doctor. His father, my uncle, was a doctor, and ordinarily you’d expect a doctor’s son to pursue a radical new course, perhaps as a thrash-metal guitarist, but his upbringing was not traumatic enough to drive him in that direction and instead he devoted himself to caring for the unwell, of which, Sunday, I was one. I called, he answered, he phoned in an order for Paxlovid to a Fort Lauderdale pharmacy, and spared me a long miserable wait in an ER while doctors attend to serious injury.

Winter is here, thank goodness, P.T.L.

Minnesota got a good dousing of snow this week but not the light dry sparkly snow that inspires jollity but the heavy snow that tangles up air travel and leads to delays and cancellations and you see ordinary sensible well-dressed people sleeping on floors at the airport, their heads on knapsacks, our friends and neighbors turned into homeless refugees. I was on a flight out of MSP to LaGuardia, which got delayed a couple hours due to 50 mph winds in New York City but people didn’t complain: the thought of dramatic turbulence, the plane bouncing and shaking, grown men grim-faced, agnostics praying devoutly, children excited by the roller coaster ride, as we descend low over a body of water, is something we’re glad to avoid. Pilots don’t use the word “turbulence” — I imagine company lawyers sent them a memo — they refer to “a few bumps” but we passengers know better, so we were in good humor as we unboarded the plane we’d boarded twenty minutes before and camped out in the gate area to await further developments.

There’s money in dystopia but so what?

One advantage for us Christians of living in New York is that we’re a small minority just like in early A.D. living among Romans and Turks so we can’t lord it over people. We walk quietly. If schools avoid using the word “Christmas,” we understand. Children walk past, cursing like truckers. We ignore it. In places where Christians form a powerful majority, they can bully and persecute with great enthusiasm, even though our Savior instructed us in kindness and charity.

I speak as an old man. Righteous intensity fades with age. We spend too much time wringing our hands over evil. I no longer read stories about What’s-His-Name. There’s nothing more to be learned about narcissism. Fascism is not that fascinating.

An old man thinking at the Thanksgiving table

I decided not to spend $700 for a seat at “Music Man” on Broadway though I love the musical and know most of “Ya Got Trouble” by heart and sometimes “Gary, Indiana” comes spontaneously to mind or “Lida Rose” or “Goodnight, My Someone,” so it’d be $700 well spent, but Broadway theater seats are too small for a tall person, and two hours of physical discomfort and possible knee damage is two hours too many. I have given up suffering in my old age. I don’t go to loud restaurants. I avoid political rallies. I don’t hang out with boring people or conspiracy hobbyists or people who use obscenities as punctuation. I don’t pay a large sum of money to be crammed into a space designed for children.

Aversion to misery is one aspect of aging and another is feeling oppressed by material possessions. Too many books, pictures, shirts, souvenirs, gadgets, and gizmos. I could go through my closet and dispose of two-thirds of it. All I need are some jeans, black T-shirts, a few white shirts, and about six suits. I’m from the Sixties generation that rebelled against the suit, trying out leather fringed vests, paisley cloaks and capes, psychedelic scarves, ethnic things, a cowboy look, hobo styles, but it was way too much trouble planning the right look every day — way way too much — and so I started to appreciate the suit, a simple dignified uniform that requires no thought about your current identity, you just step into it and go about your business, and if someone wants to read something corporate into it, that’s their problem.