A pleasant night with nice people in L.A.

The Column: 01.11.23

I left the snowy paradise of Minnesota Saturday and flew to sodden L.A. where heavy rains are making hillsides slide into the canyons and arroyos, which is not a problem on the prairie thanks to our canyonlessness. The land does not slide on the plains unless you are very very drunk and then you go to a Unitarian church basement every Tuesday night and talk with your fellow AA members about your emotionally distant father who drove you to drink.

Most Minnesota fathers are distant emotionally and many others are physically distant, those who divorced your mom and married Bambi the cocktail waitress based on an emotion that took him and her to the mobile home park near Miami where he now sits and drinks. I am emotionally distant except sometimes in church or when I eat a toasted sesame bagel or when my sweetie walks into the room and sits on my lap. She is not emotionally distant at all. She married into my family of crusty evangelicals and when they reach for her hand to shake it she throws her arms around them, and as a result their puritan principles are sliding like a hillside. Which brings me back to L.A.

I earn my living these days as an affirmative speaker. People could go hear a lecture on the coming water shortage in the Southwest or they could go hear stand-up comedy about bad boyfriends and Kevin McCarthy or come hear me tell you that life is pretty good and could be worse but even if bad things happen there is a great deal of kindness in the world, even in places you’d never expect it, such as Texas and Florida.

It all comes down to plumbing and electricity. If water comes out of the tap and the toilet flushes and the coffeemaker lights up when you press “Brew,” you’re pretty much okay. A half-million executive directors could disappear and nobody’d notice but if you can’t reach the plumber, you’re sunk in despair.

The news media are in the business of merchandising Worst Case Scenarios. But then so was Shakespeare. When you go to see “Macbeth” or “King Lear” you don’t expect them to sit down and work out amicable solutions. Hamlet is even crazier than Ophelia and no pharmaceuticals are going to help them. I’ve seen “Hamlet” twice and don’t need to see it ever again.

When you get old, you’ve heard as much bad news as you need to know and now that mortality is tapping at your door, you should cheer up and spend your twilight years hanging out with people you really really like and eating food you love and spending your children’s inheritance on nice hotels and not Airbnbs with other people’s underwear under the bed. When the big coronary hits, you don’t want to be in seat 21D squeezed in between college sophomores, you want to be up in First Class where you’re more likely to find a cardiologist who can hit your chest with the heel of his hand in a way that startles the ventricles into pumping again.

Back when I went on the wagon in 2002, I told my sweetie that in twenty years I’d take up pinot noir again and maybe graduate to Armagnac but I’m not going to do it. I’ve been experiencing some short-term memory loss such as standing in the kitchen with a spatula in hand and forgetting what I was going to do with it. After a glass of pinot noir, I might forget what the thing in my hand is called, and it would be embarrassing to ask my wife, whose name is Jenny. I’ve already forgotten what a reflexive pronoun is and I couldn’t define “subjunctive mood” if you were to put a loaded .357 Magnum to my head, so I want to maintain my remaining memory.

The Magnum was the comic-strip detective Dick Tracy’s pistol back when I read the comics, but now I read the Times, which abjures comics in favor of long articles about drought in the Southwest.

I met some of my L.A. audience after the show, all of them overachievers, aware of the various crises we face, and probably nobody had told them for a long time that life is good and they seemed pleased to consider this. They thanked me. Good. It was my pleasure. Thank you.