Garrison Keillor's Blog

I’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.

You heard me right. Those slender vegans in jogging pants do not thereby receive a GET OUT OF DEATH FREE card but run the same risks of choking on a cork or being flattened by a falling anvil or reaching for the energy drink in the fridge and instead getting the bottle of rat poison. Things happen.

I am living proof of this: two-pack-a-day chain-smoker for twenty years, glass of Scotch in my hand — I thought it was what serious writers did — and I loathed calisthenics, never jogged, my idea of physical exercise was cursive writing. And here I am about to turn 84 — it’s like the pudgy kid winning the pole vault.

It’s also an age when anxiety is swamped by gratitude. The plain goodness of life — the pleasure of getting out of bed and accepting the gift of one more day — I didn’t feel this when I was in my early 20s and writing Poor Me poems about a lonely alienated hero but I feel it now. The soft breathing of the sleeping woman next to me, the hike to the kitchen, the smell of coffee.

I keep a warm place in my heart for friends who were cheated of life — Leeds who at 20 went through the windshield thanks to a drunk driver who pulled out on the highway, Barry who at 20 reached for the cigarette lighter on his dashboard and didn’t see the school bus stopped ahead of him, Roger who at 18 dove off the rowboat to impress his girlfriend and forgot he couldn’t swim. Cousin Lynne at 22 who pulled out onto the highway though the sun was in her eyes and the semi struck before the driver could hit the brake.

I keep them in my heart as a reminder not to waste the gift they were denied. Everyone has pain to deal with but talking about it makes it worse; a cheerful heart is a good strategy, which sounds trite because it is trite but nonetheless is true: when you feel down, you meditate on the goodness of life and let yourself be bucked up.

By “goodness of life,” I don’t mean Mozart’s Ave Verum or the lilacs and tulips blooming this week in Central Park or the millions of galaxies a billion light years away, I am thinking of the miracle of this morning’s shower, standing naked in all the complexity of Manhattan but I turn two knobs and hot water falls on me and flows out a drain. I’m thinking of the frozen waffles available at any grocery — I think of the laborious process of mixing dough and heating the waffle iron, which now is accomplished in two minutes in your toaster.

For me, the goodness of life is the memory of Julie, the girl in green shorts who challenged me to leg-wrestle with her in her backyard in 1954 — how could a 12-year-old boy say no? She was long-legged and suddenly I was flipped over backward and she was on me, her hot minty breath in my face, our bodies entangled, her bare left shoulder pressed to my groin, and I don’t know what your sexual awakening was but mine was memorable and I’ve been fascinated by womanhood ever since.

I’m married to a woman who is, thanks to healthful living, strong and quick, and has a playful nature and though respectful of my dignity as a published author, she has made numerous Terribly Interesting Advances toward me and every day brings the possibility of a fresh attempt. A clean man drinks his coffee and eats his waffle and hears the approach of footsteps.

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Getting 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.

Rich and I were going to perform for 500 and I got in the back seat and we headed for the historic site and after a few miles I felt I’d forgotten something at the motel and wanted to get my briefcase out of the trunk to look for it. Except I found it hard to say this. Strange. Words came out of my mouth but they didn’t make sense. I could tell that I wasn’t speaking coherently but I kept trying, a few disconnected words at a time. And Sam the man pulled over and I tried to get out and he stopped me. A few minutes before I’d been an author, college graduate, and Episcopalian and now I was a wayward child.

He got on the phone, called 911, called Jenny back in Minnesota, a car pulled up and an EMT opened my door and checked my vitals and I was still talking garbled talk, but I did know my own name and date of birth, so there was hope. It dawned on me that I was experiencing something I’d been through a few times before, aphasia, an inability to speak clearly.

The EMT said there was a hospital some distance away and offered to take me. I said no, and so did Sam and Jenny. I signed off on the decision to release me. Sam canceled the show and we headed for New York City, two hours away, so he and Rich could fly home. I kept insisting that I wanted to do the show. I was starting to speak more clearly. Sam said no and he had Rich sit next to me in the back seat, maybe to keep me from jumping out of the car. I kept assuring them I was okay and they disagreed.

What bothered me was how good the parody of CSNY was, that I was missing the chance to sing it.

You who recall this song

It’s been a long time since the Sixties

Your hair is thin up there

Your memory’s very dim and misty.

Hear your children say,

It’s moving day, today we’re giving

Orders to you, today you move,

You’re going to assisted living.

You can argue, you can cry, but the Sixties have gone by,

It’s a sharp stick in your eye, but we love you.

Yes, the house must be sold, and Neil Young is getting old

And this song is green with mold, but we love you.

You’ll be on the second floor, it says Memory on the door,

You are turning 84, but we love you.

The words were clear in my head but I couldn’t speak them, just hum the tune.

I invited them to spend the night at my apartment on West 90th Street. They agreed. We unloaded the car and Sam took it to a garage. Rich and I ordered a Thai supper for the three of us. I beat him at Scrabble. The food arrived. We sat down and had a pleasant supper, recalling old Prairie Home Companion days, the annual Talent from Towns Under Two Thousand contest, various mishaps at live broadcasts, and at 10 everybody turned in for the night.

I can’t wait to get back out on the road. At 84 there’s nothing to prove, you just want to make people happy. Life is a gift. It’s a miracle that we exist and so a person must be grateful for every day, including Sunday. But be sure to take good people along with you.

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My 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.

I had three great nights in Northern California and Nevada and Tucson, some landslides of laughter, and then bombed in Scottsdale. It happened when I said, “These are crazy times we’re living in” and the crowd went dead. Scottsdale is a red city, I found out. They thought I was going to rip into DJT for posting online a Christlike image of himself healing the sick. So they folded their arms and frowned and I stood on stage and took my punishment.

The tour took me to the Granite State of New Hampshire where the state motto is “Live Free or Die,” which strikes me as harsh. There are more than those two options — living free and dying — and anyway dying isn’t an option, it’s an obligation. I lived more freely fifty years ago when I smoked three packs a day and indulged a fondness for whiskey and took the stairs two at a time, and was in love with two women at the same time. Since then I’ve deleted those things in the interest of being happier in the time I have left.

I’m from Minnesota where the motto is Peius esse potest et probabiliter mox erit. (It could be worse and soon will be.) My people were worriers, not warriors. I am 83 and “living free” is a concept I don’t take seriously. Back in January, I got up in the night and suddenly became a physics experiment and I’m still recovering. If I’m to suffer serious injury, I want it to be while defending a child against a vicious beast, not by tripping on a rug. Which, of course, is not for me to choose.

In Portsmouth I heard from some Trumper friends who said, “You need to deal with your Derangement Syndrome. We are going through some bad polling now and $5 gas and jittery stock market, but we are here to stay and you need to make your peace and accept that this is the wave of the future. The Bible says that we should be Christlike and that’s what the president was doing in that post. Get over it. Don’t be such a scumbag weirdo leftist creep. What will persuade you to support him and help make America great?”

I’ll tell you. If the man would use Universal Fight Club cage matches as a way of settling international differences, I would buy the red ballcap and the autographed Bible and stand up to my sleazy radical lefty friends.

Let Don Trump and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf get in the ring and take care of things man to man, no holds barred, kicking and punching and kneeing in the groin, neck-wrenching, along with the spitting, snot-blowing, poop-smearing, and verbal abuse, maybe some eye-gouging and biting, and see who says “Uncle.” Name-calling — any three-year-old can do that. Let’s see what our leaders can do grappling while smeared with all sorts of bodily fluids.

War is terribly expensive. Three hundred billion dollars and more under the bridge and the man has threatened to DESTROY AN ENTIRE CIVILIZATION so they will be LIVING IN HELL and nobody seems quite certain that the Commander is in full command of himself, and his midnight threats have our allies on edge, whereas a simple cage match encounter would resolve things quickly and painlessly. WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?

I connected with the Portsmouth crowd. I sang and told stories and tossed out some poems and expressed my love of the English language and 600 people went home happy. It was the only time in their life when they sang The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Abide with Me, Honky-Tonk Women, and I’ve Been Working on the Railroad in one evening. When you’re 83, you have nothing to prove, you’re free to do what you love. Portsmouth is a beautiful town and your life is not complete until you’ve been there and walked around.

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It’s not easy keeping up with our Commander in Chief, who one day posts a picture of himself as a radiant Christ-like figure in Biblical robes healing the sick and another day attends a Universal Fight Club match in Miami at which martial arts fighters pound the snot out of each other, meanwhile conducting Operation Epic Fury, which has cost at least $300 billion so far and does not seem to be winding down. Seventy percent of Republicans approve of this, which suggests something like religious devotion, so the online deification of him is maybe the direction the party is taking. It’s a radical new phenomenon in our history, but there’ve been so many of them in his era that it’s hard to keep track.

The Founders never anticipated this, insanity as an accepted policy, the unashamed self-aggrandizement, the use of U.S. attorneys to go after political opponents. My dad departed the scene in time to avoid seeing it, he being an admirer of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and so far the policy of continual frequent and ferocious insult seems to be working fairly well. The Supreme Court has gone along with it for the most part and if it resisted and the C.i.C. issued an executive order dismissing four Justices, who would intervene? The Court has no army or navy, no Imperial Court Enforcers in paratrooper gear to carry out its will. If the C.i.C. got it in his head to send Special Forces into the Vatican to grab Pope Leo, it would cause an uproar for a day or two, but in our media age, storms fizzle out quickly. If the C.i.C. issues an executive order granting himself a lifetime appointment, which general is going to step forward and say, “Over my dead body” and what distant base will he be reassigned to? With 70% approval among Republicans, the Senate is not likely to take action. Newspapers are cutting back on journalism, and the influence of a Times or Post editorial is less than that of the average drum majorette.

Democrats seem exhausted by the sheer volume of outrages, the egomania, the chaos, the unreality. It’s like the Universal Fight Club that took the place of boxing. Obama v. Romney was like Louis vs. Schmeling but Artificial Politics is with us now and ChatGPT will be able to create algorithms to flood the Web with outrages, take the opponent’s face and create realistic horrific video that will pound the crap out of the most honorable public servant. The birther phenomenon of 2016 was kindergarten and we’re in high school now, heading for college.

I imagine my fellow Episcopalians are amused by the Jesus Trump, one more juvenile prank by America’s oldest fourth-grader — how does one respond to insanity? You see a man come running down the middle of Broadway shouting things you cannot quite make out and swerving up onto the sidewalk and running past you — you don’t challenge him, you keep an eye on him, you prepare to take evasive action, but he goes galloping past and it’s simply one more minor incident, so trivial you may not even mention it to your wife when you come home. There are crazy people in the world.

When a crazy man commands the world’s most formidable military force, however, it creates a problem. The captain in the West Wing who holds the nuclear football must be thinking about this: he has the code, the C.i.C. needs the code to send the order — what if the Commander is dressed like Jesus and is shouting things that make no sense about the election stolen from Viktor Orbán and the framing of Jeffrey Epstein and the media conspiracy to deny the Gulf of America and the need for Greenland?

Has West Point prepared the captain for this eventuality? I’m only asking.

There are advantages to being 83 years old and one is the Not My Problem option. I went off to Sonoma last week and hung out with some people my age and we stood around singing Do you remember when we used to sing sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la la-la-la-la-de-da and everyone knew the words so we sang Chantilly lace with a pretty face and a ponytail hanging down and Goodness gracious, great balls of fire. Pure silliness. I loved it. We’ve been horrified long enough. We can be horrified again on Friday. Time to dance with our arms in the air and be joyful.

Joy is one thing the C.i.C. has never experienced in his adult life. Poor man.

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My favorite aunt was my Aunt Eleanor, which I can say now that I am auntless. I had 17 of them, both Mother and Dad came from large families, and I don’t know what I’d have done without them, probably ridden freight trains and lived in hobo jungles and wound up in Leavenworth. Eleanor was a farm girl and loved animals, was a great gardener, could handle a gun, played sports, and was a nurse, so she lived life on a practical level. She was Dad’s favorite sibling and when he talked to her on the phone, he became a different person, told stories, was funny and uninhibited. And she was a beautiful letter writer.

Letter writing is a lost art but it’s been losing for a long time. Most people are hesitant to put themselves on paper. They say they’re too busy but really it’s a problem of reticence. Why embarrass yourself?

Eleanor wrote in fine declarative sentences, nothing about inner turmoil and nothing about national affairs. Only what she had seen or heard directly. She lived life firsthand. Family came first and neighbors.

She wrote in 1987:

We bought two more steers to put out in our pasture. They are Angus and weigh about 580 lbs. We still have Whitey that we plan to butcher this fall so we can let the two Angus grow up. We have surely enjoyed what we have eaten of Blackey. There was 652 pounds of him plus 17 of liver and a large heart that we have never weighed. It is the best meat we have had for many years.

Our peas are up and the strawberries are budding but we have kept the strawberries covered the last two weeks. Nothing is going to grow much until we get water or rain. We are eating rhubarb and had one meal of asparagus. Our New Brunswick maples lived through the winter and I hope they survive the spring.

We had a very strong wind on Thursday, which took the remainder of Ethel’s willow tree. There was one gust that went through here that I thought was going to take us too. I was feeding the animals and heard a roar coming through the woods, and I took shelter in the barn until it quieted down a little.

Phil and Carlene were out yesterday with their little girls. We finished freezing the apples for pies for Phil and then the girls and I played. When we were riding the three-wheeler out on the back side of the alfalfa field, a deer ran ahead of us for quite a distance. That pleased Meghan and Ona. There were two deer out there today when I started out to fix the salt block.

I have been working on the story form of the family history. It has been terribly lonesome without my sister here to call on the telephone daily but I am surviving.

I had an experience yesterday just before noon. The doorbell rang and when I went to the door there was a young bushy-haired, bushy-bearded man with a gun in a holster on his hip and a shotgun cradled in his arms. In the split second that I had to consider my options, I wondered if I should slam the door and lock it but then I said to myself, ‘Oh, don’t be a coward!’ I walked out the door and asked if I could help him. He was furious and said, ‘You shot my dogs!’ Of course, we hadn’t but it was next to impossible to convince him. He finally cooled down enough to tell me that they had been shot with buckshot and of course we do not have a gun that shoots buckshot. He said he had followed their tracks and the tracks came into our yard. Eventually he settled for trying to follow their tracks further. I was not impressed with his intelligence — walking up to someone’s door fully armed.

Love, Eleanor

I read this letter in her beautiful handwriting and she comes to life, this capable observant woman whose mother was staunch and smart. She is gone but she is still a moral authority. I’m now older than she and engaged in entirely different work, doing stand-up comedy, but I still ask myself regularly, “What would Eleanor think?” This is why you should sit down today and write a letter to one of your children, or a niece or nephew: the future needs more than a photograph, it needs to hear your voice.

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I saw the F-word in the New York Times on Sunday, at least it was in my copy, and I don’t mean “fake,” and it was spelled out, all four letters, as posted online by the Commander in Chief in his early morning harangue against Iran, and though he considers the Times fake news, the White House hasn’t denied that he wrote it.

The Times didn’t use dashes to soften the shock for their younger readers but spelled out the word, I think, in order to convey the tone of the post, which the Times described as “blistering” but which most readers would describe as insane. If you got a note from your neighbor saying “you’ll be living in hell,” you’d call the cops and they’d come.

An evangelical preacher might say “living in hell” from the pulpit but he wouldn’t use the F-word with it. This was after the Easter luncheon at which an evangelist compared the Boss to Jesus Christ and the look on the Boss’s face was priceless: he tried to look modest but he looked quite pleased. This was the lunch at which he said, “If I were king, I could do a lot more.”

Still, it was a surprise on Easter morning to consider the possibility that the President of the United States is out of his mind and wonder how the Founders intended for us to deal with it. The 25th Amendment allows the Vice President with a majority of the Cabinet to declare the President unfit, but what would convince this particular V-P and Cabinet that such is so? Mr. Trump walking out to the front gate without his pants and drooling and shouting unintelligible things with a finger up his nose? I doubt that would be sufficient.

His post Easter morning was the sort of thing a First Lady ought to deal with, put her hand on his shoulder, and say, “Darling, this will do you no good whatsoever and please think of the children.” The man is venturing into dark territory. “Disapprove” is a mild term for what’s happening, the polls should think of adding “Embarrassed by” and maybe “Loathe.”

There have been dishonest presidents like Buchanan and Andrew Johnson, wretched ones like Fillmore and Pierce, fools like Harrison and Taylor, but never an outright nutcase and narcissist on top of it. Conservative columnists are turning on him lest their college degrees be revoked and perhaps their high school diplomas. And the historians are waiting in the wings. And somewhere in the West Wing lurks the insider who will write the first tell-all.

Meanwhile, spring is here, which is the prevailing reality. Trees are blossoming, grass is greening, this little pebble of Earth makes its way around the sun, the moon following like a faithful dog, and at night we can gaze through the mists and see, or sense, an infinity of stars, billions of galaxies, some of them billions of light-years away, back before Earth existed. Church was full on Sunday, my fellow Christians celebrating Resurrection, which science has so far not verified. What the Creator put us on this pebble to achieve is for us to discover in the brief time we have, but it surely has to do with the enlightenment of the soul that leads us to a state of wonder at the beauty of the Creation, including the humanity He placed here and created in His Likeness, so we’re told, though this week one does wonder about that.

I come here in holy communion with a hall full of believers, semi-believers, unbelievers trying to believe, unbelievers married to believers. It is a transcendent moment and you’re no longer in ZIP code 10024 or even the U.S. of A. — you’re in the Universe. I come for clarity and that begins with gratitude and then I put my multitude of sins in a drawer and close it. Sins of omission, dereliction, capitulation, ostentation, isolation, not to mention self-flagellation, and when I turn around for the Exchange of Peace, I shake hands and feel I’m blessing all Manhattan.

I don’t cry at movies, but I do cry at church. The line from the psalm, “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me, Thy rod and Thy staff, they comfort me.” I weep at the promise of resurrection and we sing, “Shall we gather at the river where bright angels’ feet have trod.” We are washed in the river and then we come back to America at war.

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It’s a dark time in our country, with the price of gas up high and so the cost of sending B-52s to bomb another country is making Wall Street nervous, and anyone throwing a party in April has to wonder what the festivity level will be and will all that pricey champagne go undrunk as people stand around moaning about the bad news we get constantly because the phone is right there in our pocket. Everybody needs a good party now and then and I mean serious silliness, not just wry irony.

By “good party” I mean one where people get giddy on a glass of something and then the music starts and it’s loud enough to drown out all conversation and we hear a song from when we were 16 and suddenly we’re immature again and everyone dances with their hands in the air and sings Van Morrison’s great O O O my brown-eyed girl, do you remember when we used to sing, SHA LA LA LA LA LA LA DE DA LA LA DE DA. And even the guests who are in their 80s know the words because it’s from 1967 when they were twentyish. Old people are dancing wildly who didn’t think they could dance due to hip replacements and their neurologist recommended against it and pretty soon we’re singing — Help me if you can, I’m feeling down, and I do appreciate you being ’round. Help me get my feet back on the ground and minutes ago we were responsible citizens concerned about birthright citizenship and now we’re wild pagans at a fertility festival.

Silliness is essential to human life, it’s proof that life can be joyful, we need not die from indifference.

Other countries have gone through times as hard as today’s. The Spartans of ancient Greece were brutal warriors who hacked their neighbors into submission and left no evidence of comedy behind. The inscriptions on those temples are, according to scholars, not funny. That’s why it was called the Dark Ages. (Or should it be “they were called the Dark Ages”?) Their deities were not amusing, Zeus in particular, whose way of dealing with opposition was senseless violence followed by casual sex with a mortal, transforming himself into a swan, a bull, whatever came to mind.

The Romans tended to deify their tyrants, just as our Senate does today. Julius Caesar, as you know if you read the play that was assigned in 10th grade English, was stabbed in his Senate, but never mind. Life was no picnic for the Romans. Every New Year’s Eve as you see the annus keep going down, down, down, and it’s 11 B.C. and then 10 and 9 and you have to wonder if the world is coming to an end or what?

Meanwhile, everywhere I go today I hear people grumbling about the state of affairs when we could be singing about a girl named Sue who knew just what to do. When did we lose our sense of fun and become so earnest? I went to a ballet performance in Minneapolis a few years ago and a woman came out onstage before the curtain went up and said, “We wish to acknowledge that tonight’s performance takes place on land that was unfairly taken from the Lakota people.” Pointless symbolism that achieves nothing except to spritz a little sanctimony around.

My generation produced so much great music that made people jump up and down and wave their arms in the air, and we owe it to the kids to put on a party and celebrate the miracle of living on this little pebble of a planet twirling in space among billions of galaxies, and a NASA rocket heading for the moon with a functioning toilet aboard. If that doesn’t call for a party, then what does?

Flannery O’Connor said, “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” And she was so right. “Get away from it,” to me, means a crowd in my backyard enjoying some beer and also their anti-seizure meds and somebody starts singing Chantilly lace and a pretty face and a ponytail hanging down and you look around and the rector from church is jumping around too. She went to Bryn Mawr and she knows the words and she’s singing her head off.

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As I’ve said many times and I’ll say it again, life gets smaller as you get older and you delete things you don’t really care about such as folk dancing and canoeing and camping — camping is a refugee experience, I was a camp counselor for two summers, I lay on hard ground in a cloud of insects dealing with terrible constipation and every time I smell insect repellent or see an insulated vest, I thank the Lord, “Never again, thank you.” I gave up golf in my thirties, the sheer pointlessness of it. Some people tried to get me interested in bird-watching. Sweetheart, the birds know who they are and they don’t use our words for it, they have their own.

No, what a man needs is someone to love and something to do that he loves to do and if possible a daughter. I have my true love and last week I went around and did a show and I sang and told stories and did stand-up and I never mentioned ***** except to say, “I am 83 and an optimist and I believe that one day soon the wackos who are in charge will return to their stone huts in the swamp and we will be free to be who we are, a kind and curious and generous people who’ve done great things in science and invention and extending their benefits to all.” And people cheered.

It’s Holy Week for us Christians and it’s lovely to be one in New York City where we’re a minority, just as it was in Jesus’ time, and so it makes sense to love your neighbor. Many of my ancestors were illegal migrants: David Powell headed west in 1859 to look for silver and the Shoshone didn’t invite him to cross the Missouri, the Arapaho didn’t offer him a visa, he had to be civil to them, trade with them, hunt with them. He never found silver but he was okay with failure, it led him to discover other things such as community. He was in the territorial legislature that wrote Colorado’s state constitution. He was a flatlander who loved the mountains. He had a flock of children, including my great-great-grandfather. When I was a little boy, I lay on the floor listening to my aunt Ruth tell stories about him.

I hope the people who came to the show remember it, and repeat the good lines, like “I’m married so I’m in Assisted Living, and I’m too old to do the things I never wanted to do anyway, like camping.

I said, “We may be the last generation that knows the words,” and Lord, those people loved to sing, “My country, ’tis of thee” and “Great Balls of Fire”—they shouted the lines, mature educated decent people reliving their teens, and Beatles songs and “Auld Lang Syne” and I sang, “I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis” and they knew the words and when they sang “Honky tonk women,” they really honked.

A lady in the front row yelled at me, “You need a hanky?” and I pulled out a hanky and blew my nose and she gave me a thumbs-up. I recited “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” Shakespeare’s sonnet that my teacher Helen Story had me memorize in 1959 when I was 17 and it’s still there in my head, his words about the power of love to banish our troubles, and that’s what the evening was about. Surreal things are happening in America as you know if you look at the papers, men in paratrooper gear hanging out in airports, weird late-night posts on Truth Social, talk of “federalizing” the November election. We have a fourth grader for President and now he shows signs of dementia and his midnight posts on social media are weird beyond belief, and it’s good to go to Wilmington and the old opera house and hear a big crowd sing “America the Beautiful” in three-part harmony (there’s a tenor shortage these days).

Keep the faith, my dears. Someday someone will write a book and explain how it all happened — is there a fungus among us? Were there asphalt germs in the shingles shots? Have Martians landed in the marshes and become federal marshals? Meanwhile, be nice to your neighborhood Christians. Resurrection. It’s impossible but we believe in it. Have a good eternity.

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I’ve started a new career as a stand-up comic after fifty years in fiction and as anyone can see 2026 is the worst time to do comedy, maybe since the Middle Ages. We have a regime of wackos who are anti-science, anti-education and rather whimsical about raining deadly destruction on other people, and how do you satirize terminal stupidity? So I don’t. I go after Thoreau and his brand of individuals. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” — horse hockey. I go out and do 90 minutes about the pleasure of being an elderly English-speaking American Episcopalian guy and people enjoy this. It’s about the pleasure of community.

Thoreau was the first in a long line of alienated loner cowboy poet heroes marching each to his own drummer, including plenty of felons and billionaires and sociopaths who drive cars with 95-decibel tailpipes and folks who get a kick out of blowing up things coming down to the current alienated loner Leader who had the power to pay the TSA workers but didn’t for five weeks while Americans waited in lines at airports for three and four hours. He has his own plane and doesn’t go through a metal detector. He ought to go through a soul detector.

It seems clear that it was an American missile that hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in southern Iran killing more than 170, most of them young girls, and if you have a heart, you can imagine the horror of little kids and teachers under a building collapsing on top of them, you can hear it and see it, but our Leader does not march to that drummer. Nor does he bother to argue that Iran posed such a threat to us that the wholesale bombing was justified.

I never mention him in my stand-up routine nor anything else on the front page of the paper. I grew up in a beautiful country and that country still exists. In Hudson Falls, New York, I gave 500 people the chance to sing “My country, ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty” and also “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide” and “Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread” and “They built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue” and they knew all the words, and then I sang “I met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis, she tried to take me upstairs for a ride” and the whole crowd was right there — my people are good upstanding folks of gentle disposition, including a good many therapists, schoolteachers, geriatric psychologists, administrators of recovery programs, Methodists, but they felt a communal identity, they were not about to secede from the group, and we came to the chorus and they sang the HONK-y tonk women and really made it honk.

They’d never been in a barroom in Memphis, wouldn’t know a woman of the night from a daycare director but this was the blues, American blues, as brought to America by a bunch of Brits, and they enjoyed being in that club of 500, not one Thoreau did I see who clapped his hand over his mouth. We even went on and sang the second verse about the divorcee from New York City who covered me in roses, she blew my nose and then she blew my mind, and we honked again.

In twenty years, you won’t be able to stand up in front of a crowd and get them to sing the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” because the internet and the cellphone enable everyone to find his or her own private cavern that’s all about coelacanths or arthropods or genderless people who wish to identify as carbon-based life-forms and everyone will have several podcasts of their own and there will be mighty few experiences common to all.

So I’m going around preaching to the choir, reliving the old culture that’s fast disappearing. Every day, in Central Park, in Strawberry Fields, you find people sitting playing guitar and singing “Imagine” or “I Saw Her Standing There” or “Baby You Can Drive My Car” fifty years after those songs were hits. It’s sweet. People go to ball games because it’s the same as always, nobody has suggested changing three strikes to four or eliminating the shortstop to allow more scoring.

I love being on the road, driving through Connecticut and down to Long Island, mixing with the customers. My parents never talked about politics: it was far away and they were focused on family, the immediate, work, play, weather. Let the angry young men and evangelicals who gave us these wackos take responsibility for it, and I intend to enjoy my life in my country. God bless it.

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I am a Minnesotan, I speak the language, it’s my home so dear and its name is a beacon bright and clear. I attended the University of Minnesota and majored in English, which prepared me for a career in valet parking. I wanted to be a writer so I drank heavily and tried out all the illicit drugs offered to me but the good stuff went to the coasts, and the Midwest got hashish that was less potent than used coffee grounds. I never got high until I had two wisdom teeth extracted and was anesthetized.

I went into treatment for naivete and it helped. Minnesota is a national headquarters for the recovery industry, where you’ll find enormous camps for drunks where they listen to lectures and break into small groups to talk about their emotionally unavailable parents who failed to vindicate their personhood. There are programs for people in grief at the loss of a pet, people who want to stop being Scandinavian, people suffering from traumatic taciturnity. I suffer from a fear of leaving food on my plate and scraping it into the garbage and I’m sure there is a group for me.

I’m a writer and I could live in a lighthouse in the Orkneys but I moved to New York because I fell in love with a New Yorker. She thought I was cool because I had copies of The New Yorker around my apartment but they were delivered by mistake. Wrong address. I discovered that I could cure my Minnesota accent by sticking a piece of adhesive tape on the underside of my tongue, which makes me sound like a Harvard graduate.

We live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Unitarians live over on the East Side, people who don’t recognize badness but see it as a misunderstanding, the result of not having been read to as a child. The Upper West Side is the domain of Jewish mothers who know right from wrong and tell wrong to take a hike, which gives us Episcopalians permission to do likewise. Being from Minnesota, however, I hesitate to stick my nose out. I am modest to a fault.

I only raise my voice at athletic events. I decline compliments. I’m not good with profanity. The difference between a Minnesotan and a New Yorker is this: ask a Minnesotan what kind of salad dressing he’d like, ranch, balsamic vinaigrette, Italian, Russian, honey mustard, Caesar, or blue cheese, he says, “Whatever is easier for you, whichever you have more of, whatever nobody else wants.” Ask a New Yorker, he says, “How about tahini muscatel?”

Minnesota could’ve been French, you know. Louis XIV sent explorers here to scout the place, Marquette and La Salle, but changed his mind. It’s not a good climate for wine. A Minnesota Bordeaux has the bouquet of crabgrass and the texture of potatoes; our Pinot Noir tastes like peanut oil.

Minnesota was a techno hot spot years ago but the brightest minds went West and now we’re the No. 1 producer of turkeys, high-strung birds with a teeny brain and enormous torso and fragile ankles who are prone to panic and in a thunderstorm. Google may be developing a robo-app called Gobble that can manage turkey breeding, and then the state will become a vast turkey concentration camp run from an underground control center, a hundred million birds auto-fed round-the-clock, a sedative added to prevent panic, which could result in a million birds with broken ankles. The turkeys’d be herded by bird dogs to the butchering mills to be gutted, defeathered, flavoring injected to make the meat taste turkeyish, and shrink-wrapped for market.

One of these days, you’ll read that Minnesota has been bought by Amazon, twenty thousand square miles of turkeys, run by a couple hundred truck drivers and four mathematicians. During busy times, truckloads of undocumented Canadians will come over the border to do the butchering and hatch the eggs. Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, and Rochester will survive, the small towns will disappear, and Jeff Bezos will have two seats in the U.S. Senate.

I’m not one of those old people who lament the loss of the old days. I prefer pastrami to turkey. My sweetie and I are both wired into ConjugalGPT, which reads brainwaves with generative preference transformers to create artificial infatuation and we exist in a state of bliss, no questions asked. Yes, I am a robot. Proud to say it.

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