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I’ve been down with a bad cold, feeling listless, nestled in a brown comforter in a big chair, but I got a lift from the president’s promise of a $5,000 dividend to every grown-up if the Republicans win the midterms. Marjorie Taylor Greene denounced it as “socialism,” because all grown-ups would be paid, not just Republicans, but it’s a very generous offer, and with the Iran war won, the economy booming, the streets safer, crime declining, America finally respected around the world, you wouldn’t think a cash bonus would be necessary, but so be it.
I am thinking I might spend my $5,000 on an arch and so I’m shopping around for an architect. I’d like to be remembered by future generations in the event that this cold turns out to be a fatal influenza brought on by intravenous immunization and the books I’ve authored won’t be legacy enough in the post-literate world to come, when texting will replace publishing — no, you really need to put your name on things, such as an arch.
Read MoreI did a show just before Labor Day in Annapolis, across the bay from Baltimore, and it was good to look around at Druid Park and Edgar Allan Poe’s neighborhood, Fell’s Point — Poe, who gave us that midnight dreary and the raven who kept saying “Nevermore,” and over on Hollins Street you can find the home of H.L. Mencken, a writer I loved when I was a teenager for his cynical wit. Mencken disparaged religion, education, journalism, marriage, democracy, and patriotism.
I loved his line, “The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom.” And “All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.” And “The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.” And “I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.”
Read MoreI am on the road this weekend and not getting the nourishment I need, and nature tells a Minnesotan to go to the State Fair and put on weight for the long winter, which is what the Fair is about, nobody goes there to eat the Salad On A Stick and the Hummus-Pup, you go for the cheese curds and the 800-calorie Cinnabons, so that in January, if your car skids off the road and lands upside down in a deep ditch and leaves you hanging from your seat belt, stunned, unable to pull your cellphone from your pants pocket, you’ll have the wherewithal to lean on the horn, turn on the flashers, say “Siri, play the Rolling Stones’ ‘Honky-tonk Women’ and turn it up to ten,” and by the time they meet the divorcee in New York City who blew their nose and then she blew their mind, the Highway Patrol will spot you and the EMTs will be on the way.
Puny people do not think outside the box. They get locked into diet restrictions, refusing to eat oats that were inorganically fertilized and eggs from incarcerated chickens, and find themselves unable to deal with the unforeseen. A mad scientist drops a cage on you and throws it in his truck and you wind up in his underground laboratory waiting to eat the enzymes that’ll turn you into a centipede and your diet of lima beans and pea proteins fails to motivate you to go for his throat with a serrated knife, which is exactly what you should do. Puny people are fatalists. Good eaters have a sense of entitlement, which is necessary for self-defense.
Read MoreLast week I got a phone call from an old friend who lives in the mountains of New Mexico and is happy there among the snakes and coyotes and birdlife and wild greenery and I listened to him rapturing about a life I would regard as a penal sentence for serious crimes.
I am a city person and have known this since childhood when I spent miserable summer hours hoeing rows of sweet corn on Fred Peterson’s farm and my great pleasure was hitchhiking into Minneapolis to sit in the library. I read Thoreau’s Walden in high school, and in my forties, bought a cabin in the woods in Wisconsin and had no idea what to do there and gave it away and moved to New York. It was a smart move.
Read MoreI am missing the Minnesota State Fair this week, too busy to fly home and go see it, but I still miss it, the giant swine in the Pig Barn, the magnificent Percherons, the Pronto Pups and deep-fried cheese curds, but I don’t have a small child to carry around on my shoulders and so it would be lacking wonderment and only be for nostalgia and that isn’t reason enough.
I wheeled my little girl around the Fairgrounds when she was two and fed her her first taco. She beheld the chickens with the fancy anklets, the dairy cows, the draft horses. In her stroller, rolling by the 4-H building, she was suddenly engulfed in a high school marching band and the clatter of drums and was thrilled by it. Also by Ye Old Mill and the Skyride. And so I got to relive my own childhood Fair and the blaze of late summer before school begins, the carnival before we settle down at our desks to do our assignments.
Read MoreMy old pal Suzanne Weil says, “If you’re in a good place, then everything that happened before was the right thing because it led you to the place you are now, so you should be grateful for everything,” which sounds to me like someone has been spending too much time in the sun. It’s the sort of idealism we see in Natalie Harp, the devoted aide who seldom leaves the Chief’s side, reading him idolatrous emails from admirers, meanwhile the national debt hits $40 trillion and a war drags on as the Great Man builds an enormous ballroom as a matter of national defense. Who is minding the store?
I visited St. Paul for a week and was struck by reminders of my many mistakes, which was why I left a decade ago and pitched my tent in Manhattan. A fresh start. I haven’t done many dumb things there. My Minnesota romances ended badly. My one New York romance is in its 32nd year.
Read MoreI was out on the road last week doing my one-man stand-up show, enjoying the friendliness of breakfast waitresses, appreciating fresh-made hash browns over the packaged, and sometimes they’re in a mood to talk and I hear about the kids, the autistic daughter, the elderly parents and the absent husband, the stuff of real life, not the amusing tales that I offer. I’m a good listener. I enjoy this.
I had a wretched cold Thursday for the show in Indiana, a cold that felt like percussive dystrophy of the anterior fantods and I was thinking of canceling right up until people started coming into the hall, but I staggered out and then I sang “Key to the Highway” with the verse I wrote:
Read MoreI feel bad for Bill Cassidy who, if you were casting a movie, looks exactly right for the part of the honorable senator who stands up for principle against a powerful bully, and who knows that the president’s personal lawyer who maintains that the 2020 quite possibly was rigged should not be Attorney General — I’m not sure anyone named Blanche should be. But Senator Cassidy is a Louisianan, he’d like to attend football games and go to church and shop at Kroger without someone taking a swing at him, and if he voted Blanche down, he might have to find an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where Republicans are rare as ospreys. It was a tough call for him and he called it wrong.
He voted to confirm the guy because, he said, he thought the next nominee might be worse, by which logic you’d accept fried weasel for lunch because the alternative might be fried rat.
Read MoreI think I speak for all Americans when I say that it’s good to have some rules and to know, after last week’s primaries, that if, in your adult life, you posted online that Thanksgiving is a celebration of colonialism and should be canceled, you’re not going to win the Democratic nomination for governor, at least not in Wisconsin. These are weird times with the president being off-loaded in a food container, and so many rules and standards have fallen in the past decade, that it’s reassuring to know that Thanksgiving is above reproach and, I assume, Christmas and Memorial Day and a few others.
The Democrat defended her comments, just as a Democrat would, by saying they came during periods of personal growth in her spiritual journey to become the individual she is now, and she only lost by 1%, but still she lost. And she doesn’t deny it.
Read MoreSo I’m working on a new book and then suddenly I’m engrossed in an online story about a 5-bedroom 1.5-acre, $7.5 million home for sale in the Hidden Hills gated community in L.A. and what I loathe about it compared to where I am with my sweetie, in Manhattan in a 2.1-bedroom with a little terrace with hydrangeas where a mourning dove family has raised its young.
This didn’t happen back before laptops, when I did my writing on a legal pad with a Sharpie, the sharp kind. This is the fault of the internet, which makes all of human knowledge accessible by one fingertip. It’s hard to stay focused.
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