Don't ignore this. It's important. Read all the way to the end.
The Column: 04.26.23
Think things through. If you quit exercising because you feel good, you’re likely to take a fall and get injured and feel worse. If you fall in love with a married person, you’re likely to have a guilty lover. If you let your life go to pieces, you’ll be too depressed to do anything about it. In the end we live on trust, so don’t look too far ahead, take it one day at a time.
Every day, try to make a little progress; forward motion is good for the soul. Recently, I bought postage stamps online at USPS.com and it made me happy, skipping the line of cranky people waiting for half an hour behind the gentleman who’s sending money orders to Sumatra, Samoa, Szechuan, and the Czech Republic, and wishes to insure each one, and when you finally arrive at the embittered old crone behind the barred window and ask for a sheet of the Railroad Stations stamps, she snaps, “We’re out of that,” and suddenly your life seems meaningless and absurd — no, instead of that, I sat in my kitchen and filled out an extensive form, including a password with a capital letter, a numeral, a punctuation mark, and an Urdu character, and the answers to three security questions — my favorite hobby (writing), my first girlfriend (Corinne Guntzel), and what she saw in me (pure wit and raw sex appeal), and there it is, no need to leave home and run the risk of being killed by an e-bike.
I am in favor of convenience. My cellphone is a loyal friend; when the train is late, when the prescription isn’t ready, I can read news bulletins, text my daughter, call my wife and leave a lusty voice mail.
Convenience is why Jeff Bezos will soon own the solar system. Everything is there at the Amazon website, books, beer, a bag of groceries, a car, a corner lot in Coronado, and my password (FoxNews787m) is easy to remember, and so I give them my business and they’re killing neighborhood retail and so I walk past empty storefronts with “For Rent” signs, and it’s too depressing to go for a walk, so I don’t, and I lose core strength and trip and fall and bang my left knee, and I hobble around with a cane, an object of pity. I have sheets of Railroad Stations stamps but I lost my address book years ago, I only have email addresses. In my loneliness, I fall in love with Juanita Bono the cleaning lady and her husband, Jorge, comes after us and she is weeping (¿Dios mío, cómo pude ser tan estúpida?) and I don’t speak Spanish so I’m lonelier than ever and I go back to Minnesota where it’s snowing in April and I move into my sister’s basement.
Think things through: that’s my point.
We live by trust, as I say, and I discover that all those portfolios of financial information and insurance policies that I, who don’t have an MBA, couldn’t understand one sentence of, but nonetheless signed my name and date and returned in the envelope provided — over the years I surrendered the entirety of my assets to my beloved wife and I do remember her address, which is the one that formerly was mine, and I sit down and I write her a letter in ink, in my own legible hand, “My beloved, I am the victim of a dark conspiracy between Jeff Bezos and Joe Biden and possibly Jimmy Buffett and Joan Baez and John Wilkes Booth and somehow, I don’t know how or why, they’ve robbed me of every last penny but the loss of material possessions has shown me that you and you alone are my all and everything, and before I go to the railroad station and lay my head on the tracks and let the 5:19 pacify my troubled mind, I want you to know that,” and I put a Grand Central Station stamp on it and mailed it and days later my cellphone rang — it was down to 1% power — and it was Jenny, telling me to come home, all was forgiven.
Which is why I’m launching this GoFundMe campaign. If you could donate $20 to help pay for my reunion with my beloved, I’ll give you a “Think Things Through” T-shirt. I can take cold cash, credit cards, PayPal, or a pound and a half of marijuana. Thank you for listening. Your generosity has restored my faith in humankind.
HEADS UP!
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Special characters make passwords more secure, so consider changing it to something like Fox"News"787.5m
This is wonderful -- giggly, sad, hopeless and hopeful. I'm an old bag, in my '80s, and regain strength when I think of your advice to be watchful, to look at the clouds pretending to be a dog or cat or god, to take deep breath, I'm not so frightened. Thank you.