Fifty candles on the cake, must be a mistake

The Column: 01.24.25

When you celebrate the 50^th anniversary of something in your own life, it tells you that you’re older than you thought and that career change is no longer an option, much as you wish you’d gone into software design so you wouldn’t have to ask children how to reformat a page on your laptop, but okay, longevity is what we were going for, right? It’s why I stopped smoking. I was a chain-smoker because I thought that’s what writers do and then I saw them dying off in their forties and fifties. I wrote mostly about existential grief, but when I married and had a kid, I had to get a job and I got one in radio because it was the 6 a.m. shift and there were no other applicants.

It took me about five minutes to figure out that listeners didn’t need to hear about grief at 6 a.m., they had their own, so I got into comedy. I grew up evangelical, which is a solemn thing so I seldom smile and therefore TV was not an option but I wanted to be useful so I did radio and fifty years later, strangers come up and say, “I listened to you during a hard time in my life so thank you,” and to me, this is endlessly amazing. And that’s the story of my life.

I’m 82 and I still work full time because if I didn’t I’d suffer anxiety about Washington and what’s the point of that? He’s our first convicted-felon president and nobody knows who might deter him from making it a lifetime appointment so why should I waste my declining years in anxiety? I’m in the DEI woke left wing and that’s trouble enough; I need more silliness in my life, not anguish — I did anguish in my twenties. Enough. Now I write:

There was an old man from the prairie
Determined to laugh and be merry,
And write light verse
And never curse
Not even when necessary. 

I worked like a crazy person back in my middle years to make up for an intelligence deficit, doing a radio show, trying to be an author, and I had to give up watching TV for about forty years, though I loved TV, and so I have no idea who the celebrities are anymore and I’m still stuck in the old culture when we kids of blue-collar parents aspired to attend symphony concerts as a sign of social mobility and now those days are gone forever. Now you can imagine Hulk Hogan becoming Secretary of Education — confirmed narrowly, but confirmed — and deciding to deny federal money to any school system requiring attendance beyond the fifth grade. Not saying that’s a bad idea, just noting the change in the country. And war with Denmark has not been ruled out, at last word.

But it’s none of my business. And I’m not saying that taxes aren’t exorbitant in the upper brackets and need to be brought down to one or one-and-a-quarter percent or that Medicare and Social Security aren’t a waste of public funds — let the kids take care of the old people, everybody has a spare bedroom or a sofa bed, no reason for the enterprising to look after the laggards. If you want universal health care, apply for Danish citizenship and learn to pronounce the ø and enjoy herring on toast (ristet brød) or become a Brit and learn to misspell “labor” and “neighbor.”

Ignorance has been a fine strategy for me. I speak English and once knew the difference between “that” and “which” and tried to explain it to others but that is a hopeless cause, which I’ve now abandoned. Nuts to which. Nuts to science. The country has voted against it and in favor of setting up oil wells in national parks until the fuel runs out and the sky is dense with smog and we have July all year round and cities are burning and New York is a few skyscrapers sticking up out of the Atlantic. I favor diversity but only in Kansas City. For me, it’s reclusivity.

I sit at my desk and write about cognitive dissonance. A psychoanalyst pal told me realize that all the bric-a-brac of Freudian analysis means little, that you simply listen sympathetically and offer common sense advice such as “Don’t give up.” (I think she called it “creative dissonance.”) Maybe voting for a felon is also cognitively dissonant, but I’m not there yet and wouldn’t know about that.

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