Uncategorized
Now that the election is over and done and the last votes in Alaska have come in by dogsled, and the punditry is done and candidates have stopped texting me asking for just $10 to save our democracy, it’s good to get back to daily life and try to look like I’m from here and not from out in the Corn Belt. I moved here because my wife loves New York and a man who’s married to a happy woman is a happy man. If she were fond of iguanas and pythons, we’d live in Florida, but she isn’t, she cares about great art, fine music, theater, opera, and she reads books, so we’re in Manhattan, and I do my best to fit in and not look like a Minnesotan.
Minnesotans say, “So how’s it going then?” but in New York I drop the “So” and the “then.” We wait for the Walk sign before crossing the street; New Yorkers cross if there’s a gap in traffic. As a Midwesterner, I was taught to Let Other People Go First, but when you do this while getting on or off a subway train, it causes a traffic jam and it infuriates New Yorkers and they may use an obscene word. I am unable to use obscenities, they simply don’t come out of my mouth. I hear New York children use them casually — children who attend schools named for saints — but it doesn’t work for me because I still do not want to disappoint my grandma sixty years after she left this Earth.
Read MoreI dearly love these autumn days and so do you unless you live down South and must endure the 70s and now many of you have elected radical Marxists to public office who will tax the shirts off your backs and confiscate your guns, leaving you defenseless against illegal migrants who will eat your cats and dogs, but up here in the North we are doing just fine, thank you.
When the Pilgrims came on the Mayflower in November 1620, they intended to land in Virginia and were blown off course and landed at Plymouth Rock instead and found themselves in a heap of trouble immediately. There was no climate change back then, so it was bitterly cold, and canned food hadn’t been invented, nor antibiotics, so many perished from malnutrition and pneumonia — but luckily for them, there were no Stephen Millers among the Wampanoag along the coast, no Indian Culture Enforcement (ICE), because half the Pilgrims died that first winter, there were hardly enough to care for the sick, so they could easily have been driven into the sea, but Squanto, Massasoit, and Samoset brought them provisions and helped them get settled, and that’s why Governor Bradford proclaimed the first Thanksgiving a year later.
Read MoreTo my regret I’ve lost touch with many Republican friends over the past fifteen years but I’m still fond of them and remember good conversations and in the wake of their party’s rout last Tuesday I have a word of advice. Google the transcript of D.J.’s two-hour campaign speech in Dubuque on November 1 and sit down and read it.
He ranted about the press, that the Times said he was unpopular despite his 99% approval rating and that the U.S. would be a third-world country in 24 hours if the Dumocrats took over. (“That’s a name I’ve come up with,” he said.)
Read MoreI hit a wall last week that tells me that obsolescence is around the corner and one day soon I’ll be parked in a sunny corner with a quilt over my lap, listening to the CD I made with Heather Masse ages ago, the one with the Grateful Dead’s “Ripple” on it and Bob Dylan’s “Mozambique.” I will hear someone in passing say, “He used to be in radio, I hear.” And someone will bring me my bouillon and my pills.
The wall I hit is Microsoft Word, which has been my standard word processing program as a writer since I abandoned my Underwood manual, a beautiful machine, you had to hit the keys hard, you had to really mean what you wrote. Microsoft Word can do thousands and thousands of incredible things and I only use three, write in English, store it, and retrieve it, but last Wednesday my laptop went berserk and I restarted it and it went bonkers again. My two tech wizards, one in Wisconsin, one in Florida, couldn’t solve the problem, and I called a friend from church who runs an investment company and he offered me a Korean employee named John who called me and guided me step by step so that he could see my screen on his computer, and quickly and simply solved the problem.
Read MoreIt’s been nine years since public radio and I split up, a divorce I’m happy about though also grateful for the forty-year marriage. It was a bitter divorce so there was no banquet, no tearful eulogies, and I felt the tremendous relief of never having to participate in another membership drive and tell listeners of my importance in their lives. I just walked away and didn’t go back.
Public radio was an offshoot of the liberal arts ghetto of universities, and like in the English Department where I was a student, enthusiasm was looked on with suspicion and ironic aloofness was the prevailing style, so they looked down on my silly show and Guy Noir, Private Eye, and Ruth Harrison, Reference Librarian, and The Little Town That Time Forgot. They went in for Mahler’s Sixth followed by a lecture on the possibility of a volcanic eruption destroying Wyoming, Montana, and Utah.
Read MoreStupidity is a revelatory experience for an old man, his own stupidity, not the lives of the rich and famous but his very own, a man who’s earned a living by his wits who one day does something phenomenally foolish and brings life crashing down. I ignore the news stories about our Leader’s son-in-law’s billions in slush funds from Middle East potentates for favors rendered, the pardons sold, the cryptocurrency profits, the steep decline in Washington ethics that America has come to calmly accept as normal, thievery that would’ve astonished Warren Harding, Boss Tweed, and Ferdinand Marcos, but I do not ignore my own stumbles, screwups and walking into walls.
I was in Fort Pierce, Florida, on a tour doing stand-up comedy with a brilliant young comic named Erica Rhodes. I do reminiscence and she does keen observation and dark irony. I tell stories, she does jokes. The audience is fond of me and amazed by her. She talks about her father who, as he was dying, said, “I hope you get some good material out of this,” and indeed she does. We’re a good pair.
Read MoreIt came to me while I was trying to figure out the self-checkout in a drugstore, how to register the barcodes, where to put the credit card, though folks my age don’t like the term “checkout,” I say “complete the transaction,” it struck me that Vladimir Putin personally is worth upward of 100 billion dollars. Which explains his perpetual smirk when he shakes hands with our guy. He has a good deal more money.
Commies used to be the enemy, remember? Tyranny, concentration camps, knocks on the door in the night. Now it’s just another form of enterprise. We supported Ukraine fighting for its freedom but now we do Putin a huge favor and suggest that Zelenskyy take a hike. What comic book is this from?
Read MoreI’ve been working long days to finish a new book, a memoir of being a contented 84-year-old, rambling around America doing stand-up and last Friday, sitting in an old library on East 79th Street, I started to feel good about my narrative as it dawned on me how lucky I am and decided to celebrate by calling a spa and arranging for a shower, hot tub, and massage, for relaxation, and now it makes no sense to me at all.
I enjoy writing. Actually, I enjoy rewriting. The first draft is a hike through an infested swamp. The third- and fourth-draft fixes are fun, deleting the hemming and hawing and the frilly foofaraw to impress my English teachers long deceased and I scratch the complaints and the last few changes can be almost euphoric. You can honestly feel that you are taking a piece of wreckage and making it something useful — and how often does one get to say that in life? Not often enough. The library is a gracious place and except for the laptops it could be from the age of Emerson and Thorstein Veblen. Sitting surrounded by silent men and women at work, minding business, is definitely salubrious — you tend not to fall into the mindless googling that befalls the elderly who grew up with Britannica encyclopedias and now are thrilled by the ease of doing whimsical research and finding out where Lee Harvey Oswald grew up and who wrote “Ozzie and Harriet” on TV and who is Lake Harriet in Minneapolis named for and do most police carry body cameras and which states have unicameral legislatures, if any. This is a tragedy among elderly authors who still have much to give the world if only they could break the Google addiction to meaningless inquiry.
Read MoreThe big news this week that other planets exist in the cosmos that could support life gives a person hope that Elon Musk will think beyond the moon and Mars and his SpaceX geniuses will build a spaceship that travels the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) and fly to a smaller planet that will let them leap over tall buildings and improve their golf game and let the King of Queens rule freely and absolutely.
He’ll rise in the morning and look himself in the mirror and say, “You’re not just a man, you’re a nation,” and he will piss a golden arc 250 feet, have his own arts center, and his face will be on the currency, and he will own the whole works. He is no fool; he knows that History will beat him to a bloody pulp and his arch will soon be fallen and his ballroom will become a Tesla Showroom but on Planet Trumpet he will be worshipped as a deity and not part of a Trinity, thank you very much, but a Supreme Solo Being, and meanwhile the rest of us will resume our lives.
Read MoreMy lady and I paid $360 each for seats at Verdi’s Macbeth last Thursday night, which crossed my mind briefly as we got out of the cab at Lincoln Center and crossed the plaza past the big fountain and got in line at the Met. I’m old and so $360 is a hefty price for the privilege of sitting in a chair for three hours, but the woman I love loves Verdi and so there I was.
I married up. She comes from a musical family and went to her first opera when she was 12, seeing Grace Bumbry sing in a Met production of Carmen. I come from an evangelical family and we wouldn’t have gone to see Verdi if he’d written an opera about the Second Coming. My taste ran more toward Loretta Lynn and Lefty Frizzell. “Long Black Veil” about the guy who goes to the gallows for a crime he didn’t commit rather than tell the judge that on the night of the murder he was in the arms of his best friend’s wife — that’s my idea of opera.
Read More