Living in the present, a day at a time
The Column: 02.05.25
Most aphorisms are self-evident, such as “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” and the one about glass houses and throwing stones and the mice playing when the cat is away and “As you sow, so shall you harvest” and as I get older, the ones about living in the moment and seizing the day and not crying over spilt milk feel very profound.
I remember a day fifty years ago when I had lunch with my hero S.J. Perelman in Minneapolis when he was to give a reading and I was to introduce him. I was stunned by admiration for his writing, such as: I guess I’m just an old mad scientist at bottom. Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a beautiful girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.
I admired elegant wackiness, having grown up among devout Christians who even in dinner table conversation tried to sound like the King James translation. They wouldn’t have written a paragraph like his about the mad scientist if you’d gotten them drunk, sat them on a bundle of dynamite and set the timer to ten minutes. I knew Perelman’s work from The New Yorker and also from the Marx Brothers movies (great lines like “Don’t wake him up. He’s got insomnia. He’s trying to sleep it off.”). He didn’t know me from Adam or an atom-smasher. I looked at him and tried to compose a suitable compliment but nothing was good enough and then a man told him that I had been published in The New Yorker and Perelman leaned across the table and started complaining about the magazine, its miserly payments, its confounded editing, and its clueless fact-checkers who ripped into comic fiction as if it were a doctoral thesis, and it was the ultimate honor, to be treated as a fellow working writer by the great Perelman. I was prepared to kiss his ring and he talked to me as a colleague in his line of work. The honor of equality.
His illustrious past didn’t matter, the future was unknown, but there we were, two writers having a Cobb salad and a chicken sandwich, about to go meet an audience, living in the present.
I guess I’m just an old humorist at heart. Give me a wedding chapel, a groom who forgot his suspenders and is trying to hold his pants up, a beautiful girl with last-minute trepidations, the man puts the ring on her finger as his pants drop, there is an expulsion of gas, and I care not who wins the National Book Award.
I live in the present. If I were to think about the future, I’d be alarmed about the utter demise of journalism and the self-degradation that many U.S. senators are eager to accept and the use of cryptocurrency to enrich the Chief Executive by tech tycoons kicking back 20% of their federal contracts, but instead I spend the day in my laboratory experimenting to design AI software to let me chat with long-deceased relatives such as my great-great-grandfather William Evans Keillor who says, “I don’t know if this is heaven — it looks like Nebraska — and immortality is not my cup of tea but I’m getting used to it. No calendars, no clocks. The good news is that death dissolves your marriage so I’m free of Sarah and I’ve taken up with an angelic slip of a girl named Celeste who flutters about in water-wings and silk undies and instead of beans and bacon we have rigatoni with zucchini, cannellini, salami Bolognese, prosciutto, radicchio, parmigiano, pepperoni primavera, chorizo crostata, guacamole, guanciale Calabrese, pistachio pesto, and Sangiovese. We never had Italian food in Minnesota in 1880.”
He’s quite the guy. Opinionated but very witty. I told him to look up Perelman and now the two of them play canasta together. I’m living in the present, which, thanks to AI, includes the past.
I guess I’m just Elon Musk at heart. Give me an office in the White House, let the old guy revise the Constitution with the wave of a Sharpie all he likes, I will give the Nazi salute when and where I please, and when the Earth burns up, I’ll be sitting on Mars eating a Milky Way, and I care not that I’m the only human being in the universe.
It’s a busy winter for Garrison Keillor, who is on the road with many live events, this month and beyond! You should come out and see a show!
CLICK HERE for schedule and tickets.
The late, great American writer and analyst of American culture and politics, Gore Vidal, wrote a novel decades ago presciently predictive of what is going on in Washington now. The novel "Khali", involved a young, genius American medic in Vietnam during the war in that nation devises a deadly pathogen that, after inoculating his family and close friends releases the pathogen on the world killing every human except his family and friends. At first Jim "Khali" and his cohorts enjoy the world without interference by any other human. " Khali's"wife adopts a male and female baboon to provide amusement. Khali's intent is to repopulate the world with the offspring of his wife and consort but neither of them are able to bear children. Eventually all Khali's associates die off while the baboons multiply unchecked. Eventually Khali himself dies and the world is ruled by rampaging troops of baboons with civilization now in ruins.
The truth is most painful and reality sucks. You’re building your own realities that enable you to go forward into our future, as bleak as it appears to be. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and prayers. At least yours are really from your heart.