Garrison Keillor's Blog

The temperature dropped a little this week, from the 80s into the 70s, a relief for us elderly who go back before global warming. I like winter and we used to get a touch of it in late September, a few snowflakes, a little frost on the windows. Winter is a beautiful time of quietude and reflection. Weathermen talk about Minnesota being “hit” by a snowstorm but snow doesn’t hit, it falls gently to the ground and lies there until plowed or shoveled.

I was around before lightweight thermal wear was developed and I walked to school through waist-high drifts knowing that if coyotes caught me and took me to their den and devoured me, the world would get along just fine in my absence, and so I was alert to coyote sounds and didn’t dally and felt great relief when I walked into Benson School.

Winter served its purpose: to teach us that, as Galileo said, the world doesn’t revolve around us or exist for our comfort and pleasure. It has a will of its own.

Summer weather in September isn’t good for this country; it leads to moral relaxation. A big crowd of generals and admirals sat and quietly listened to their crazy Commander’s meandering speech inviting them to join in a domestic war against his political opposition and they politely clapped instead of rising up and grabbing the demented man and clapping him into custody. Their oath is to defend the Constitution, not him, and his suggestion to establish a police state should’ve been met with force. But the weather made them dozy.

Craziness and stupidity are a dangerous combination and you find less of it in folks in the North because the wolves and coyotes eat them or they fall through the ice. If you planted the Commander in a cabin in northern Minnesota with a pair of skis and no phone, he’d be helpless. You can’t impress a grizzly by waving a fistful of cash at him.

The world is changing rapidly but some things remain the same. A great many young people worked hard in college studying computer science — young people whose education is about to be suddenly obsolete thanks to AI, but the ability to speak English clearly and persuasively and with grace and humor is as valuable as ever, maybe more so. And the Commander’s stumblebum hourlong mumbling embarrassment in front of dedicated officers should’ve been the end of him, but the show goes on. He strode to his executive helicopter and the Marine at the door saluted just as smartly as ever.

We seem to be watching the Fall of the Roman Empire in our lifetime. The Romans accepted inept emperors and the Germans let the gas out of them, pffffffffffffffft, and it was goodbye Ovid and hello Henry. This is history, you should look it up sometime.

I hold my generation responsible for the narcissist songwriters and pious progressives who prompted America to elect this corrupt and proudly ignorant regime in which patriotism is replaced by personal fealty. Hardworking tax-paying immigrants are flown to foreign gulags, meanwhile the palace crowd is cashing in on public office. Mencken predicted that the White House would be adorned by a downright moron one day and here he is. We have him.

It seems to me that we Episcopalians used to pray for the president of the U.S.A. and now we don’t anymore. I guess today he might be included among the Sick and Distressed.

I had uncles who were Republicans but they distrusted generals going back to their own days in the military and they had a low opinion of politicians. The Pentagon Papers proved them right. They’d be astounded by the Quantico Follies.

The Republican Party is trying to deal with the Commander the same way you’d deal with your daughter if she went to live with a 400-pound guy with swastikas tattooed on his face and a proclivity for triple quarter pounders and peppermint vodka — you’d be polite, invite him into your home, and not indicate by the slightest wince or groan your utter disgust, but so far this approach is not working and now you are praying that please, Dear Lord, may there not be offspring.

What Washington needs is four feet of snow and two weeks of minus-40 lows and let the gentleman sit in his Evil Office and think these things through more clearly.

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The priest at church Sunday morning said, clear as a bell, “Do not be afraid. Receive the news with joy.” He was not referring to the Sunday Times, I believe, though I hadn’t read it and was feeling pretty good on a summery Sunday in September having been to hear a Schumann piano quintet the night before played by the Callisto Quartet and Philip Edward Fisher that really rocked out, it was what “Great Balls of Fire” could’ve been if Jerry Lee Lewis had been to Juilliard and studied composition.

I didn’t want to go to the concert but my wife said, “Great music is good for the soul,” so I went and she is right. Schumann suffered terribly back in the early 19th with seven kids to support and Brahms to compete with and he went mad and died young, but here is this great work that, played by brilliant young talents, can shake your nerves and rattle your brain in good ways, even if you’re old like me.

Old age is the age of gratitude and I have more to be grateful for than you kids do. Chicken in a package from a cooler rather than flapping its wings as I carry it by the ankles to the chopping block. I’m grateful for the inferior drugs that were passed around at parties in the Sixties in Minneapolis and rather than be a goody two-shoes I sniffed it and smoked it and it was like sniffing powdered sugar and smoking used coffee grounds, all the high-grade stuff went to rich people in New York, and now look at Washington and see what heavy price was paid in cognitive skills. If you and I had had that stuff, we’d still be in recovery talking about our parents and how they failed to affirm our sense of self-worth.

Back then, my sense of self-worth was none of my parents’ concern, it had to do with how well I did my job, and I did it very well and it wasn’t easy. I was a parking lot attendant in a crew of four — two ticketers, a flagman, and a parker — and I was the flagman. It was a gigantic gravel lot, no painted lines, capacity of 300 cars, and my job was simple: the drivers believed in individual liberty and I had to be the heartless dictator to stifle freedom and direct them to the correct parking space, otherwise chaos would ensue, cars jammed in and preventing passage, anarchy, possible violence, and so I, a Christian gentleman, learned to yell at people, including women who were some of the worst offenders.

We stood in church Sunday and prayed for the world, for the sick, for the forgiveness of our sins, and I also gave thanks for the laptop computer and the cellphone. Grateful for the little garbage pail icon that lets me throw whole documents over the cliff and into the sea. I used my cellphone to snap a picture of my wife on her birthday in a French café courtyard in Soho and send it instantly to a dozen pals — imagine doing this in 1966, the Kodak Brownie, the week waiting for the development, the postage, the addressing of envelopes.

And I gave thanks for my friend Father Bill Teska who passed to Glory a couple weeks ago, the Episcopal priest who told me that the beauty of ritual worship is that you can do it even if you don’t feel like it, which is when it’s most important to do it. He said that if you listen for God you will hear Him, that it all begins with faith and then you seek understanding. Bill thought awe and wonderment were the beginning. And eventually I went back to the Episcopal Church and indeed God’s presence is felt.

When my daughter was born, Bill baptized her, a big booming baritone in full regalia, proclaiming the faith as she lay fascinated by his big black beard and held onto his pendant. And now, twenty-seven years later, I’m still grateful for the blessing that she is. To others I may be a conundrum and a bump in the road but to her, God help me, I am an emperor of love and delight. Darling, I’m doing my best.

I am grateful for simplicity, for the principle of “Less is more,” for the idea of deletion, which is much easier now with the laptop computer, an entire key devoted to it.

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I got a call Thursday from a Lutheran pastor in Iowa saying she was running for Congress and would I contribute money to her campaign and we talked for a little while. I was busy working on a book and could’ve said so but there was something unusual about her — her voice wasn’t loud, it didn’t grind, she didn’t talk in paragraphs, she talked in sentences and then she stopped and let me talk.

I told her that the news has been making me dizzy for months and now the lucrative deals between the Arab emirates and the Witkoff and Trump families and the FCC threat to cancel the licenses of networks that broadcast criticism of the Administration is taking us into a shadowy land of unreality that should arouse outrage but has become commonplace. But I was impressed that this soft-spoken woman was entering the fray. I’ve poked fun at Lutherans for years and they enjoyed it. They are hopeful people who look around and see the goodness of life.

Her name is Sarah Trone Garriott and she’s running in Iowa’s Third Congressional District as a Democrat. I looked up a news story about the race and saw that her opposition was portraying her as a radical out-of-touch lefty who would “allow men to play in girls’ sports” and the deliberate deceit of those words convinced me to send a donation.

The planet is heating up, Putin is trying to re-create Czarist Russia, men are going into schools and shooting kids, armed men are rounding up hardworking immigrants and sending them to gulags in other countries, planeloads of Guatemalan kids are headed for God knows where, wackos are taking over the public health field, billionaires are gorging at the public trough, and you think that Jimmy thinking he’s Joanie is a major issue for Congress?

Our government is cutting billions in foreign aid to low-income countries, cuts that are estimated to result in the deaths of almost five million children in the next five years — a whole holocaust caused by one man with a swish of his big felt-tip pen. This is a strange road for this wealthy country to take.

Senator Grassley of Iowa has introduced a bill to help victims of age discrimination. He is 92. I imagine that, as a Republican, he’s opposed to men playing in girls’ sports and opposed to your grandma joining the Boy Scouts and your cousin Harry being admitted to the Sisters of Mercy. Well, I am too, but in the long list of public issues, I don’t see these as higher than 107th.

I am 83 years old and maybe this is dementia talking but I accept that the needs of the young take precedence over mine. I am opposed to cutting languages and music and drama from public school curriculums in order to pay for Viagra and other erectile therapies for elderly males. I accept that erectile dysfunction is God’s way of saying men over 80 probably shouldn’t father children. I also believe you needn’t accept that I am 35 simply because I feel I am 35, which some days I do, but I keep it to myself, I don’t make it into a Cause.

I would be very wary of criminalizing ageism. It’s a squishy subject and in the long run ageism ranks lower than, say, discrimination against people with tattooed faces.

This is only my opinion and you don’t have to respect it. And if your face happens to be covered with dark tattooed leafy shapes with a balcony and pennants on your forehead, and girders tattooed on your neck and your name tattooed on your tongue, I accept your right to insist on being recognized as a minority who must not be discriminated against on the basis of w-e-i-r-d-n-e-s-s. But I hope that my party, the Democratic Party, with its noble history of standing up for minority rights, does not take up disfigurement rights or the right to decide your own age. I would consider this a death wish on the part of Democrats.

I may be wrong about this. If so, disfigurement rights may have to wait until we octos pass from the scene, including the ones who identify as teenagers.

I also believe you cannot invent a new language simply by moving your fingers slightly to the right on the keyboard and expect English speakers to accept yjod ;smhishr sd ;rhoyo,syr/ — okay? As for the FCC taking away licenses, I accept the President’s right to say whatever he thinks, no matter how nutty, and I hope he enjoys exercising the right.

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I don’t keep track of my stock portfolio for the simple reason I am utterly ignorant, having skipped Econ in college — too boring — so in the world of finance I am a mountain climber with no lantern or map and I hear woofing up ahead and hope to find a hut and a hermit who will offer me lodging. To me, it makes as much sense as Friday night bingo at Our Lady of Perpetual Mercy except not as sociable.

It does seem though that even with the national deficit rising and unemployment too and consumer pessimism and nobody has any idea where our Leader’s mood on tariffs is heading, Wall Street sees a candle in the window and is following the rainbow. The investment bank sends me a summary on the first of the month, and it keeps climbing and climbing, even with me without a map.

I was brought up by Christian pessimists who had seen the Dirty Thirties so I am trying to prepare myself for a crash and big black headlines, BANK STOCKS SKID, FED HEAD QUITS, MARKETS CLOSE AT NOON in which event I guess we’d sell the apartment at a big loss and pack our bags and move back to Minnesota and buy a house with a garden so we don’t have to fight people for food at the supermarket. But no black headlines appeared today, only small ones about our Leader’s bosom buddy Jeffrey Epstein so my darling and I go around the corner to Piatto Grande and she has two glasses of the Sicilian wine, not the Montana one, and we each have our own salad and don’t split one, and I have the linguini with meatballs.

My needs are modest. I don’t own a car because I have double vision. I travel in my line of work, show business, and otherwise am a homebody. I spent my middle years working terribly hard to make up for a lack of talent due to an evangelical background that told me, “Don’t show off” so I struggled to shed modesty, and I had no time for TV so I lost track of popular culture — I look at the gossip columns and don’t know who the celebrities are anymore — I may as well be Amish. But this life suits me. If you’re a writer and have a few friends and you marry well and have a humorous daughter, you hardly need anything else. And I went to church Sunday so my sins are forgiven.

People come to New York with a dream in mind and mine was to be an important writer and win a Pullet Surprise or the National Booger Wart, but for those prizes, you have to dress up and sit at a banquet for three hours and listen to some blowhard talk about the role of imaginative literature in a democratic society and I’d rather take a walk in Central Park and listen to the pickup jazz band playing Ellington’s “Take the A-Train” by the reservoir as the ground shakes from the A train underground, a runner pushing his little daughter in a cart, dog walkers, Frisbee players playing pickle in the middle, and the kindergarteners leashed together like sled dogs, heading for a grassy slope to be unleashed and go dashing around, yelling, laughing, apartment kids accustomed to hours of imprisonment with irritable parents and now, whoopee! thrilled by freedom of movement, competitive leaping, somersaulting, hopscotching, jitterbugging. So much public happiness.

It’s a beautiful fall and the city feels optimistic, let people in Wichita imagine it as a brutal battleground and rat-infested garbage dump, the residents know different. Yes, rents are high and that’s for the simple reason that so many people want to live here. Last night, sitting on the balcony under the starry sky, arm around my sweetheart, gazing at the landscape of lights, she holds up her cellphone with the app that identifies the planes in the sky on their approach to LaGuardia, coming in from Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Rochester, Miami. She came here from Minnesota as a teenager to be a classical violinist and had fifteen good years before she hitched up with me. I came here because my 8th grade teacher showed me a copy of The New Yorker and I wanted to write funny stuff in among cartoons and fancy ads for ritzy hotels and snazzy jewelry, in the same type font as A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. Now we have each other. Who could ask for more?

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I feel a little sad and sort of disenfranchised in September heading for October and for the fourth year in a row having missed the Minnesota State Fair and not eaten Pronto Pups or cheese curds or hot buttered corn on the cob. I am a Minnesotan, though I live in New York, and as such am sensible, wary of excess, and the Fair is our annual Feast Of Things You’ve Been Warned Against. We go see the livestock barns, the various gaudy breeds of poultry, bins of grains and vegetables in the Horticulture Building, watch the horse judging, but while walking the grounds we pick up our favorite forbidden foods, all of them portable. Walking gives us privacy and also aids in digestion. There is now a Fair Food app that will guide you to a Frozen Mango Tango or S’mores or Bison Meatballs. You take a break on the Ferris wheel and a carousel to settle the contents in your gut and then top off the day with a dish of Hawaiian Sunrise shaved ice and take yourself home to repent with a double Alka-Seltzer.

This is an extravagant exercise in the unwise that can plant your feet back on the straight and narrow just as releasing a bombshell of profanity can cleanse the heart of anger or listening to three Rolling Stones albums in a row can make you grateful to be elderly and leading a peaceable life.

The Fair is also one time when we’re all together in one place, the anti-vaxxers and the p.c. police, the radical Marxists, the Flat Earthers, the Apocalyptic Baptists, and so far nobody has suggested that Pronto Pups contain an enzyme that will make you accept the Establishment version of the news.

The Fair was created by farm organizations as a gathering of farmers and their families, to see the latest machinery and learn about innovations and compete for blue ribbons and also to connect with each other and have a good time. The prosperous grain farmers of western Minnesota and the big poultry and hog and beef producers and also my people, the marginal 150-acre dairy farmers who raised feed for the cattle and a few chickens for eggs and a vegetable garden to feed the family. Holstein cows were a generous animal who enabled hardworking families to wrest a living from hilly, rocky land no good for big crops. As a boy, visiting the farm, I sensed not much delight in the lives of Holsteins. They knew they were not kept around because the farmer loved them. Horses had names, Brownie, Pete, Prince, and cows didn’t, same as your lawnmower didn’t or the hand pump. They were simply a means to an end, machines for making milk, and when their productivity declined, they’d be led up a ramp onto a truck and shipped away to be turned into hamburger.

My dad had four sisters and three brothers. None of the girls married a farmer and only one of the boys became a farmer. All of them saw hard times up close as the Depression closed in. They saw hunger and broken lives and despair around them and determined to avoid it. All but one of them became a gardener. They read about starvation in Europe after the war, people foraging in the garbage for edibles, people eating rodents, dogs. My dad kept a half-acre garden, which fed his six kids. I grew up, never thinking about malnourishment except as something you read about in books. My generation rebelled against the farm life and sought freedom to be carefree, maybe wild. We wrote poetry. We imagined becoming interesting individuals. We were ready for rock ’n’ roll to shake our nerves and rattle our brain, break our will but what a thrill, great balls of fire.

Jerry Lee Lewis wouldn’t have been tolerated back in hard times with people going hungry. We thought it was rebellious but really it was the product of prosperity created by hardworking farmers and gardeners. So I went to the Fair for the Pronto Pup and the cheese curds but also to walk around the barns and mingle with farmers — you could pretty well distinguish them from the accountants and schoolteachers — and take deep breaths of farm smells and think about my ancestors. My grandpa James Keillor, an old man bundled up on a bitter cold day in 1925, pitchfork in hand, grinning, the pleasure of working hard outdoors.

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I went to Santa Fe to see some friends last week and it dawned on me that I’m a Northern guy with a keen sense of my insignificance who aims to be inconspicuous and that many Northerners go to Santa Fe to be picturesque. I saw grown men dressed up as desperadoes, wearing sombreros, black shirts with silver buttons, gaudy cowboy boots. I left that look behind when I turned twelve, the age at which you start to realize that work and competence are what give you your identity, not your outfit.

God designed Minnesota so we wouldn’t be distracted by mountains and could concentrate on getting the work done, cultivating the corn, picking potatoes. You don’t wear reds, yellows, and oranges, it would only attract blackbirds.

I saw people in Santa Fe wearing loose garments, the accoutrements of mysticism, scarves and jewelry and insignia that say, I am me, unique, incomparable, the sort of stuff that was worn by twentyish folk back in the Seventies.

I am old enough to remember hippies. I once watched Allen Ginsberg chanting what sounded like English while playing mysterious chords on a harmonium to a hundred people listening intently as wisps of incense drifted around the room. A nice Jewish boy from New Jersey who achieved fame for being beyond comprehension. I considered the option of incomprehensibility but gave it up when I took a wife and we had a child. And I found that the everyday world of ordinary people is so incredibly interesting that to separate oneself from it seems ridiculous.

But that’s what I saw in Santa Fe, people who probably once held down good jobs in management, investment banking, condo construction, and could then retire financially secure, to become painters. Humidity is low in the Southwest so the paint dries faster. The town is full of galleries, and not all of the art is of steer skulls and sunsets but a great deal is and some is Post-Pictorial Pueblo, giant canvases of desert landscape, studies in brown, tan, bronze, beige, burnt sienna, dust, and dusky.

Georgia O’Keeffe painted here, an artist who painted leaves that she intended to be seen as vaginas. In Minnesota, where trees are plentiful, you might collect leaves in scrapbooks but you would not see them as genitalia and you would avoid people who do. You wouldn’t want them to live next door and invite you over to look at large canvases of a suggestive nature. If you quit your day job in Bismarck or Kansas City and took up painting cow skulls and sunsets, they would laugh you out of town, but in Santa Fe you’d fit right in. Instead of blizzards you’d deal with lizards, but high-heeled cowboy boots would deal with that.

My friends who moved there said they were seeking a slower laid-back way of life, which I see as a tragic mistake but they didn’t ask me. Slow and laid-back comes naturally as you enter your Seventies and the goal should be a brisk and upright lifestyle. Laid-back will come inevitably, as you develop back problems, and you may be unable to pull yourself back into a sitting position and then you will be shipped to a pueblo for the prostrate.

I’m all in favor of freedom for the elderly and discipline for the young. The young need to become very good at work in a field where it’s clear who is and who is not. Health care, for example, is not recreational. Teaching, also. There are hundreds of others. Some may seem lowly, such as plumbing, but when a family’s toilet system goes crazy, the plumber’s status suddenly rises above that of every artist in town, every poet.

I walked into an Apple store this week with a laptop with a bad power connection and a few strides into the store I found myself in the hands of intense competence by polite young men who took an old man from the Underwood era and spoke to him in comprehensible English and solved the problem in about twelve minutes and charged me $19. I put a hand on my man’s shoulder and said, “I’m a writer, I have a book manuscript in there, I walked in with visions of disaster and I am grateful for your competence and professionalism at a time when the country is on the skids, and I thank you wholeheartedly.” We shook hands. He made my day. We need more of him.

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You’re reading a column by a guy of 83 for one reason and that’s to hear him tell you: Life is good. Boomer columnists are full of dread, millennials are discouraged, Xers are depressed, and Gen Z is downhearted, but I am old enough to see the advance of progress.

Yes, there’s pain, guilt, a sense of meaninglessness — welcome to the club — but we also have Thai takeout in little white paper containers, and same-day delivery has come to seem ordinary. There are more toothpaste options now than ever. More fragrances of soap.

Cordless phones have changed everything. You used to be on a short leash and the whole family could listen to you murmuring to your girlfriend, now the cellphone gives you freedom of expression.

You can buy an electronic wristband to tell you how many steps you took. Someday it will tell you your happiness quotient.

Depression, anxiety, insomnia: Just take a pill. Back in the day, your mother said, “Go outside. Take a walk around the block and get over it.” It didn’t work. You walked and walked and you got lost because cellphones hadn’t been invented yet so you didn’t have GPS in your pocket and didn’t know where you were and you had to ask someone and maybe you were in a bad neighborhood and the person you asked had a pistol and now you were lost and down a hundred bucks on top of it.

Surgery is better. Stuff they used to have to slice you in half for, now they run a little tube up a vein, and snip snip snip, as you sit there reading the comics. Back in the day, if you had surgery, you had big scissory zipperish scars, you could never model bikinis after that. Now? No problem.

We have vocabulary today that we didn’t have back then. Totally. We never used that word. Ever. We were sort of happy, we were sort of interested. And now we’re ALL OVER IT. We used to say “very good” and now we can say AWESOME. Back in my day, awesomeness was limited to the Grand Canyon and you had to go there to be awed and now it isn’t odd to hear it applied to clothing items and personal jewelry.

I come from the era of Karens and Joannes and Mariannes, kids had similar names, and now you have Sophias, Olivias, Avas, Isabellas — even in the Midwest, boys named Aiden and Liam, Connor, Dylan, Anglo kids posing as Irish, Noah and Jeremiah and Benjamin, Baptist kids trying to be Jewish. The Garys and Larrys and Bobs are gone. Uniqueness is acceptable. A biological male who is transitioning into a non-gender status and ultimately wants to be accepted simply as a carbon-based life form is perfectly okay.

And thank goodness for me, life expectancy has increased. Old is the new young. People in their 50s can still be immature. I’m 83 and still searching for myself — I was in radio and wrote books and now I’m a singer. Not an awesome one, but not bad.

The corner bar became a wine bar where you say things like, “This Bordeaux has a deep and expressive finish, a dense palate, and a refined but approachable body with aromas of oak and damp earth, but I find the interplay of the complex acidity and the creaminess frankly unbalanced.”

I miss the corner bar where guys tell jokes. So the one guy says, “So. This guy walks into a bar with two dog turds in his hand and says, ‘Look what I almost stepped in.’” And the other guy says, “So. An old man goes into a bar and sits next to a young woman and says, ‘Do I come here often?’”

And now I’m going to sound like an old man, which, at 83, I have earned the right to do. I feel that texting is wiping out the art of small talk. You get on an elevator with a stranger on it and you notice something interesting and comment — “What breed of dog is that?” — and he says, “Shropshire shepherd.” And this leads to conversation. I have encountered young persons who treat small-talk overtures as a personal assault.

Small talk is a fundamental part of American life, the right of any person to make the acquaintance of anyone else. And I think the cellphone has created a wall between proximitous strangers. And perhaps the minimalization of awesomeness has played a part. What’s your thinking on this?

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Life is an adventure, never ending; just when you think you’re on an even keel, the ground comes up to meet you. After church on Sunday I walked into the kitchen and slipped and fell and whacked my head hard into the corner of a wooden shelf over the table and felt blood on my forehead and went to find Jenny who was reading outdoors and she cried, “Oh my god,” and I said, “No, I’m only your husband.”

“Go to the bathroom!” she cried.
“Here? But I don’t need to.”
“Can you sit on the toilet?”
“I’ve done it thousands of times.”

She wiped blood up and put an ice pack on my head.
I suggested she put antiseptic on it.
“No, that’s old school,” she said.
I said, “So? I’m old.”

A bonk in the head led to a whole comedy routine. Remarkable.

I could feel I had rattled my brain, but I know that the mind is ever changing, gaps appear, sometimes enormous ones — I’m missing most of whatever I learned in college — and the secret of intelligence is forgetting what you don’t need. Einstein was able to come up with E=mc2 because he had only two kids, didn’t bother about his hair, skipped religion, didn’t care about sports, didn’t read fiction.

Me, I studied Henry James in college, pored over passages like Trying to ascertain if, indeed, Isabel intended to accompany him as promised to the soirée, glancing into her chambers he saw, reflected in the French mirror on her closet door, her pale naked figure like a classic Roman sculpture, the perfection of the image rendering it more like an idea than a living and breathing human — and thanks to him, I know less about economics than the average ten-year-old. Still, I know the basics. Early to bed, early to rise. Bird poop has to be cleaned off cushions or it creates a hole. Black is not a good color for a suitcase as you’d find at Baggage Claim when you see a hundred identical black bags go by: bright pink is better, sparkle green, puce, purple. Don’t drink alcohol and drive.

I quit alcohol 25 years ago when I had a small child and got drunk one night and put two and two together — “I don’t want her to see me like this and be embarrassed.” An easy decision.

I felt good Monday and celebrated by going to a barber, not a woman stylist who will nurture my hair as a sanctuary for my spirit on my earthly journey a but a guy with a revolving red-striped pole who’ll make me look nice.

Somehow the Sunday bump brought back a clear recollection of a miserable trip to Michigan years before, a delayed flight, lost prescriptions, a sleepless night, and a solo show in a theater, walking onstage to applause and feeling my whole monologue vanish from my head, a big whoosh of aphasia, a big blankness, so I stitched together other stuff, the story about throwing the rotten tomato at my sister and her chasing me across the yard and telling me I would spent eternity in hell fire, then Mazumbo the circus elephant tied to a stake and running his long trunk into the open window of the car as Dad pulled up next to him and all of us kids squealing as he sucked the hot dogs out of our hands, and then the World’s Largest Ball of Twine that a dairy farmer named Dick Nordquist created because he thought he might use the cord again and it grew to 15 feet in diameter and the hot core of the ball produced a gas, phlogiston, that cures phlegmaticism.

It was a good show. The laughs were long and hard, they made me feel like a famous stand-up comedian rather than a confused old man. Which is how I feel right now. Jenny wants me to see a doctor about the gash in the forehead and the weird dream I had Sunday night, and woke up and looked around for a “mouthpiece,” but I intend to move on.

Henry James’s brother William said, “Wisdom lies in knowing what to ignore.” Their nephew Jesse rode away from the banks he robbed and never looked back and his son Harry’s “Two O’Clock Jump” inspired the conception of thousands of children and his stepson Elmore sang,
I’m standin’ at the crossroads
And I don’t know which way to go.
But whichever way I’m heading
Is an adventure, that I know.

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I am an old man and quite aware of my earthly sojourn heading for Trail’s End, and me with much left to accomplish such as resume regular exercise and write a great American novel and set a new pole vault record for men over 80, but meanwhile I spend so much time searching for my glasses, my keys, my billfold, my cellphone, I probably could’ve written two or three great novels but then I wonder, “Does America really need another great novel?” Probably A.I. is taking over the field of fiction and soon we’ll see novels generated by ChatGPT such as The Great Moby-Dick in which Jay Gatsby sets out to impress Daisy Buchanan by water-skiing past her mansion on Long Island and is swallowed by the whale, or Grapes of War and Peace in which Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, disillusioned with capitalism, joins Ma Joad’s family on the road and is separated from Natasha who leads the Russian army against Napoleon and marries the wealthy Pierre, Andrei having fallen sick in the harsh winter, but is nursed back to health by Rose of Sharon.

A.I. would enable readers to get multiple novels for the price of one, such as Wuthering Eyre of Gulliver’s Expectations or Beloved Lolita on the Brave New Road, merging the best elements of each novel into a superior amalgamated mélange and save readers an enormous amount of time during which they could take up a program of regular exercise.

But meanwhile we saw the use of artificial intelligence in last week’s three-hour-fifteen-minute televised Cabinet meeting in which cabinet secretaries Rubio, Bondi, Kennedy, Rollins, Collins, Gabbard, Bessent, Burgum, Vought, McMahon, Hegseth, Noem, et cetera, sat around a long table and showered the boss with lavish compliments of a sort previously paid only to Divine Beings and dictators. They agreed that he was the greatest president in the history of America, without compare, whose perfect wisdom had led our country from the degradation and despair of Bidenism to the peak of such greatness beyond the power of language to describe.

There has never been a Cabinet meeting like it, I daresay, and the entire three hours is on YouTube for all to see over and over. You can hear Bondi say that the boss was “overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority.” You can hear Witkoff say that it’s time for the Nobel people to get their act together and give the boss the Nobel Peace Prize, pronouncing it “noble” instead of the way it’s been pronounced in the past. Bessent said the boss’s tariffs would bring in $500 billion a year. Hegseth said America was safer than ever before. The Labor lady invited him to come and view his “big beautiful face” on the banner hanging on the front of her building.

The questions remaining, when the three hours concluded, were: Why would the United States need a Congress? What role does the judiciary fill? Both seem more like unnecessary decorations than useful assets. And why would the country need to elect a new boss in 2028? What purpose would it serve?

Of course the meeting drew scorn from the usual sources, the New York Times and the Washington Post and their embittered Leninist opinion columnists who are still obsessed with the Russia Russia Russia hoax and the fiction of the boss’s friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and his sale of memberships in Mar-a-Lago to wealthy people who wish to make his acquaintance and his steady stream of executive orders.

What remains to be accomplished? For one, the 2024 election should be made unanimous, and the Democrats who claim election to Congress should be sent to re-education camps. The American press is creating unnecessary discord in our country that serves no useful purpose, and if the Times and Post and 30 or 40 other cynical and disgruntled publications were to disappear tomorrow, who would notice? Not many of us.

Now that the Army has made Washington safe, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco will likely be next, making cities safer for the general population to freely express their admiration of the Leader.

Meanwhile, I am starting a new system of keeping my billfold, keys, glasses, and cellphone in the pockets of yesterday’s trousers, which I hang on the doorknob of my closet, and this system has worked well for almost a week. I saved three hours and fifteen minutes by doing that and those 195 minutes were the highlight of not only last week but also the year so far.

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My shirts come from the cleaners starched and pressed, nicely folded and buttoned, every button, and I look at them and think, “Technical wizardry has not yet developed a machine that will properly button shirts, not breaking the buttons, so who does this labor? Children? There are child labor laws. No, someone does it who was accustomed to something much worse such as persecution, semi-starvation, life in a shanty with primitive sanitation, that’s who.”

So where do we come up with this rage against undocumented immigrants? For someone from parts of Africa or Asia, this work would be a godsend. Where do we get off sending armed masked men to round them up like cattle? They’re people who do difficult necessary work. Until we switch to tunics, so long as there are bankers and other stuffed shirts, this is a decent job.

My darlings, not so many teenage boys are looking to work in construction as back when I was that age. They used to and now it’s rare. Men from South America and Asia will do those jobs. Artificial intelligence is not going to fix toilets or carry out trash.

After high school, I got a job as a dishwasher in a big hotel. It was sort of a game, working fast during mealtime, hustling to run racks of dishes on a conveyor through a washer, stacking, delivering, and it was sociable, four boys on a crew, and we did good work to keep on the good side of the cooks. The next year I was a part-time parking lot attendant on a crew working a 600-car college lot, managing the morning rush, keeping them in straight tight formation to achieve maximum capacity, yelling at haughty academics to bend them to my will, a perfect job for an 18-year-old.

The other day I saw a large woman in a yellow reflective vest striding through a traffic jam at the airport and yelling, “Keep moving up! Three lines! Tighten it up!” in the loudest voice a human being is capable of. I used to do that, now she does. She appeared to be Mexican.

The ICE spectacle is naked racist cruelty and my country is not a culture of cruelty, that is for Russia. Look in Putin’s eyes and you see ingenious cruelty. America has a long religious tradition that teaches kindness and respect. No Trump children are going to work at the cleaners buttoning shirts; they’re going to collect investment funds from Arab princelings.

But why belabor the obvious? It’s summer, time to take long walks and then sit on the porch and watch the river go by and think about the goodness of this land God drew our ancestors to. My mother’s family escaped from a cruel stepmother in Glasgow, a woman who abused her stepson for getting his girlfriend pregnant. He married the girlfriend and begat more children but she still mistreated him. My mother was his tenth child. She met my father, who descended from Yorkshiremen who escaped grim lives as farmworkers to become skilled carpenters and handymen. I’ve no idea what they’d make of me, an 83-year-old on tour as a storyteller and stand-up to paying audiences — probably think America is a generous country to pay for amateur entertainment when you can watch an auction or a revival service for nothing.

I did a show at an 1864 opera house in Gardiner, Maine, in August and that was my chance to work a lecture about the Civil War into the act, the abolitionist movement that conquered states’ rights to define our culture as one of individual opportunity — the idea that race or gender or religion or country of origin does not define a person, that each person contains great possibilities. And the audience believed me, so I hummed a note and the crowd sang about trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored and the verse about the circling camps, dews and damps, and flaring lamps. It was magnificent. A mature crowd, some of them almost as old as I, who hadn’t sung that song since the ninth grade, knew all the words and also “In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea with a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me,” and they tried to believe that too.

The Bible says God looks on us as individuals. But of course when Donald J. Trump sells Bibles he has endorsed and put his name on and sells autographed copies for $1,000, it does cast a shadow. I hope God will show mercy.

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