I woke up this morning feeling pretty good about a whole bunch of things, but by luck three hours of extensive dental work put a quick ending to that. Yes, there’s nothing like dental work to give you a good dose of reality.

This particular session with my dentist — excuse me, team of dentists, in this case, this job being too big for any one person to manage alone — certainly sharpened my perceptions. Over the course of the morning, I found time to debate which drilling sound was worse (the low rumbling blaster-drill, or the high shrieking needling drill?), and to generally imagine all the ways in which I might improve my life if I survived this. Throughout, the team did its best to provide comfort and alleviate suffering, and they certainly went the extra mile. Most of us have had dental anesthesia injected into the gum area where the dentist is going to work; I suspect far fewer of us have had the good fortune to have injections all across the top gum line, all along the inside of that top gum line, and then in the roof of our mouth as well. Just another mark of distinction for this case, I guess.

As the drilling and sawing and scraping and jackhammering and power-washing and, yes, the actual use of pliers, was going on for, oh, about a century, I also reflected on how much worse this would have been in the old west. We don’t get to see too many dental scenes in Westerns — I suspect mostly because the people who’ve made such movies have rightly concluded that no one wants to see them — but I have an expansive imagination capable of filling in the missing scenes. We would have seen our hero chugging down a bottle of whiskey first, then lying there with his head tightly belted down to a table while the “dentist” (more likely, town doctor — which would also save on casting another role, given that most of those movies already had someone playing town doctor) works at him with  hammer and chisel and two attendants struggle to hold him down while we see his legs flailing wildly in the air. My feet stayed firmly placed atop the chair’s footpad, although my head jerked powerfully each time my palate was pierced with an injection needle. So my experience seems like an improvement.

Once it was all over, my entire cranium, jaw, and face felt like the aftermath of explosive demolition, with smoke still rising from the blast site. I managed to struggle out of the chair and pick my way back to my car and home, where I addressed the situation with two Alleve and a tumbler of bourbon and attempts at distraction. I looked at the newspaper, but that made my head hurt worse, so then I looked at Facebook and Twitter, but containing as they did most of the same outrage reflected in the newspaper, that was no help, so finally I went online and did a mega-Sudoku puzzle. That was a pretty good 23 minutes. The rest of the day, I dozed on and off, made two phone calls where I had to explain why I could barely talk, and generally moped around.

In all things, I believe in balance. So, given this travail and the need to counter it, and because I had clearly survived, I decided to go to Spain in a few weeks. In a stroke of good timing, it turns out that while I’m there I can see this universe’s foremost band, Pere Ubu, in concert in Madrid. Sure, it might be that I had already bought the ticket to Spain and the ticket for the concert, but I’m still mentally connecting it to the ordeal of the dental work. I already feel better.

My wife decided that what she wanted to make for Thanksgiving this year was reservations.

Here’s how we arrived at that.

I told her that all I wanted to do on Thanksgiving was eat Thanksgiving dinner, and then watch the new Scorsese/De Niro/Pesce/Pacino film “The Irishman” on Netflix. Some years I’ll cook Thanksgiving dinner, sure, but not frequently and not this year, because all I wanted to have to do with it was eat it. It’s been a productive but stressful year, and recent weeks in particular have been jam-packed (as the paucity of entries here will confirm), and so I just wanted to eat, and watch a movie. Oh, and play “Skyrim” on the PS4 in the morning. That was it.

“Do you want to go out for Thanksgiving?” she asked.

“I don’t care. If you want to cook Thanksgiving dinner, great, I’ll eat it here. If you’d rather go out, great, I’ll eat it there. Either way is fine. Whatever you want to do.”

“Okay. So should we go out?”

“Er… I don’t care. Fine with me either way.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” I said. “So… what’re we gonna do?”

“Well…” she said, “should we go out? For Thanksgiving?”

This went on a few more times over a few days, until finally she texted me that the doves had been released, a decision had been reached, and she’d made reservations.

The place we went to is the local foothold of a middling chain of steakhouses that we’ve found we actually like. There’s a full bar of pretty good drinks, the steaks and sides are better than you’d expect, and the price can be shockingly low for this sort of thing. Our turkey dinners were twenty-one bucks each, and came with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, gravy, broccoli, your choice of soup or salad, all the water you can drink, and even a cloth napkin and cutlery. A friend joined us, and the friend amiably ordered the turkey dinner and seemed to enjoy it too. Our son ordered a steak, just to prove that he could have steak on Thanksgiving.

Our server was a young man who introduced himself as *mumble.* As in, “I’ll be your waiter. If there’s anything you need, just let me know. My name is *mumble*.”

“Excuse me,” I said, “what’s your name?”

“Darwin,” he said. And instantly I knew why he’d mumbled it. Towering over me by about three stories, and with the scant and knobby build of a giraffe wandered in from the savannah, Darwin was also afflicted with a silly first name that probably made middle school difficult.  (Or, maybe not, this being California.)

Darwin’s service proved to be a mixed bag. He told my son that French fries weren’t available — although we later saw two tables directly across from us, each with towering piles of French fries. He also had a disturbing habit of holding some of the drinks near the rim — i.e., where your mouth would go. But most terrible to me was his inability to say “You’re welcome,” or even the miserable “no problem” that makes me cringe. When he brought me my carafe of wine (don’t judge), I said, “Thank you.” He said, “Uh huh.” When he brought my meal, I said, “Thank you.” He said, “Uh huh.” And so on. I wondered if anyone had ever introduced Darwin to the idea of saying “You’re welcome,” and that perhaps I should be the one to help this young man out in this way, being an educator as I am, but then I thought if there was one sure way to ruin Thanksgiving dinner for my wife, it would be for me to get into it with Darwin, no matter how well-intended. Another thing:  When we were seated at our table, we saw the receipt before us had a zero indelibly inscribed right on the tip line; that seemed pretty lousy to me, to stiff a waiter working on Thanksgiving, and said so volubly to our little party. So, even though I had some misgivings about Darwin’s professionalism, I did tip him, and reasonably — mostly because I didn’t want to be someone who’d stiff a waiter working on Thanksgiving. Especially after I’d maligned the previous people at our table.

Back home, we did watch “The Irishman.” It’s now late the next day, and my son is finally talking to me again; this is the third time in five months that he’s had to endure a movie that I “made” him watch without letting him first see a trailer that, armed as he is in his own eyes with an incredible power of discernment, would warn him off.  I’ll never live this one down.  “The Irishman” is overlong and undramatic, and its few brief highlights seem cobbled together from previous mob movies and previous mob characters Scorsese introduced us to long ago. It’s a bad waste of 3.5 hours, which to a teenager must seem like a month, and proved to be a terrible way to cap off Thanksgiving. I promptly went on Facebook to savage it in a post that currently has 128 comments, almost all of them in agreement with me. One friend said she did “like” it, but then admitted to having dozed off — a ringing endorsement indeed.  I went on Rotten Tomatoes and saw that our nation’s finest film critics seem unified in their adoration of this film, leading me to conclude that we need new film critics. Either that, or we have a payola scandal.

Thanksgivings differ across the land, in nature and in form, and so, I leave you with this:  a photo of my indomitable 94-year-old mother enjoying her breakfast on the day before Thanksgiving. This is a woman who has never counted a calorie in her life but is in no way the worse for it, a woman who enjoys every single day and every meal, who has a shot of whiskey every night before bed, and who will be glad to tell you exactly what is on her mind at all times. Her meals are courtesy of my sister and brother-in-law, who lovingly prepared this one as well. We should all be so lucky. I’m sure every aspect of her Thanksgiving was flawless.

Remember the Nintendo game Duck Hunt, where you play a hunter trying to shoot down a badly pixellated duck as it flies by?

My friend, the playwright Ross Tedford Kendall, has revealed on Quora that you can also play as the duck.

Okay, so not everyone likes Halloween. (Like this guy, for instance.)

Or like these two, who really aren’t into it at all:

But I like it enormously.

• I love it when costumed kids come to the door and get candy from me. (Finally, I think — somebody else gets to have all those dental expenses!)
• I like seeing all the neighborhood houses done up for the event.
• I like going to haunted attractions.
• I even like office costume parties. Here’s a couple of photos from the one at our office. (I’m the one who came as our real president.)

In fact, I love the occasion so much that 32 years ago I married this beautiful woman on Halloween and as part of a big costume party wedding. Here we are in the French court costumes we got married in, in the long-ago year of 1987. Remarkably, we look the same in those photos as we did then!

So, no, I have no truck with those opposed to Halloween.

It’s Thanksgiving I can’t stand.

Three big shocks from one evening last weekend:

1.

A friend and I went to see The Who on Friday night on what I’d been calling their “Who’s Left?” tour. I wasn’t especially interested in going — I’d bought the tickets as a present for my wife, who loves “Tommy,” but she was ill — but I came away impressed with the show, and impressed as hell with Roger Daltrey. Daltrey is now 75, and not only does he look fantastic, but he can still really sing, and really belt out those screams. This is a man who has taken care of himself and continues to do so! The set is cleverly constructed to allow him strategic use of those screams — before each song requiring a huge vocal blast, there is a long orchestral interlude, or a song sung by Pete Townshend, or a more low-key song, or all three  — and that’s only one sign of the incredible professionalism The Who brings to their show. At this point in their careers, and their lives, Townshend and Daltrey could be coasting; each could have all sorts of backup people supplying actual vocals and actual guitar work while these two breeze through the show. Far younger acts than these guys rely on just those tricks. The surviving members of The Who, though, seem committed throughout to delivering a high-caliber evening and doing it honestly.

Moreover, they’ve got a new album coming out. Not because they have to, but because they want to. Specifically, in interviews, Townshend has said he wants to prove that he can still write good songs for Daltrey to sing. Their occasional recent (past 20 years) forays into new material have shown he can. “Real Good Looking Boy,” from 2004, matches up well with most of their catalog, has a real depth of feeling, evoking as it does childhood hurts, and Daltrey sings the hell out of it.

The shock of this was just how freaking good this band is — still! — live in concert.

2.

The opening act, by contrast, was Liam Gallagher, formerly of Oasis. Let me just say, whoever booked Liam Gallagher to open is a genius, because he and his band are so terrible that they make The Who look all the more brilliant! Large barnyard animals sing better than Gallagher and bring more to a stage presence as well, and his band did nothing to hide this fact. He seemed to have two drummers on stage — one of them also named Gallagher, so I’m assuming that particular drummer isn’t on the tour purely on talent — and I’m reasonably certain I can play drums better than they… and I don’t play the drums.

I’m shocked that, ten years after the final death knell of Oasis, Liam still has a career. Of sorts.

3.

At some point, one can’t help but tally what an evening costs. Most of these charges come as no surprise.

The tickets were $80 each — plus that lovely “convenience” charge — so they were about one hundred bucks each. Okay. A Broadway show costs more, and so does a massage you’ll forget about in a week.

My friend and I met beforehand for dinner (sushi and drinks), and that was $80 in toto with tip — not a bad deal for a Friday night dinner at a nicer restaurant.

Parking was $30 each — ouch! — but another friend of mine runs this particular church and if some entity is going to get $60 in parking money, I’m glad it’s this one. They do good work in the community and help a lot of homeless and bereft people, and the parking is a short, invigorating walk from the Hollywood Bowl, with easy get-in, get-out for your car.

But here’s where I draw the line:

The tickets (purchased, again, as a date night for my wife and me) were on me. Because my friend bought dinner, I offered to buy snacks at the Bowl. Here’s what two pretzels and two beers cost at the Hollywood Bowl:  FORTY-EIGHT DOLLARS.

Let me repeat:  Two Pretzels and Two Beers cost FORTY-EIGHT DOLLARS at the Hollywood Bowl.

That was by far the biggest shock of the night.

My friend and fellow playwright, Ben Kawaller, writes hilariously on the dangerous idiocy that is Crossfit.

Sample choice line (one among many):

At one point he barked at me, “This is CrossFit, not art class!” Derision being the key to my heart, I took this as a clear sign that he was in love with me.

Too naturally skeptical to join a cult, I never did Crossfit. But I did do Beach Body Fitness, and so thoroughly janked my right arm doing pull-ups at ultra-speed as instructed that, six years later, it’s still not quite right. So, yeah, people might occasionally shit in the shower at my gym, but otherwise I can leave there unharmed.

Last Monday, when I got back from a weeklong trip to Jacksonville, FL on business, I was pleased to see that the nice folks I work with at Counterintuity had indeed installed a new desk and seating area and office chair and wall screen and rolling file cabinet in my office. It’s been a pleasure having these new articles appointed here, and especially rewarding working at the big new desk, which affords me plenty of additional space to struggle to keep clear of the sorts of papers and pens I inevitably clutter everything with.

One thing I don’t have any longer, amidst all this workplace splendor, is a couch.

For years, my office has had a couch, but we had a flood in the Counterintuity office back in May — long story; don’t ask; wasn’t our fault; it was the fault of a faulty pressure regulator outside the building that delivered too much pressure and broke the plumbing. Everything has been rebuilt, refurbished, replaced or upgraded since then, including all the furniture and fixings in my own office. So now I have this nice seating area, but I don’t have a couch.

Which means:  I just took a 15-minute nap on the floor.

For 26 and a half years now, I’ve run a Saturday morning playwriting workshop out of Moving Arts’ theatre on Hyperion Blvd. down in Silver Lake. And then, after that, I’ve physically crashed. Because while leading the workshop is thrilling — and it is! — it’s also exhausting. I’ve got lots to do at all times, and plenty of energy to do it most of the time, but staying that focused — on following the goings-on in new pages among the seven to nine playwrights in attendance each week and leading the discussion and trying to make positive impacts while monitoring the time — is utterly draining. In a fulfilling way, like, well, running a marathon of the mind. So, after this weekly concentration of disciplined thought, I generally go home, shut down utterly for an hour or so, and then either go to the gym or do some writing of my own.

But today, I wanted to catch up on some things in my office, having been away for that week. Except there’s no longer any couch. So I took a nap on the floor. Which was fine, really, what with its brand-new and nicely padded carpeting.

When your angle of approach to life changes, you notice things. Here’s something I noticed from my unexpected perspective, eye-level on the floor:  a little sticker notifying me that my new desk has passed the test for compliance with formaldehyde! Now I need never worry about that. Mind you, I never had worried, ever, in my life, about a desk being dangerous for formaldehyde. But as for this desk, now that I’m alerted? I should have no reason to worry at all.

Of course, it depends upon what you make of “compliant” in the phrase “compliant for formaldehyde.”

Should I worry?

Several years ago, a guy I knew told me that when you turn 50 it’s like flipping a switch and suddenly you can’t remember names.

As I’ve done with so many of these things, I thought, “Yeah, that’s not gonna be me.”

I share that because when I turned 50 that flip got switched, and because it’s good to admit to past hubris. (I think it’s also good to resist the inevitable tide, so there.)

Everything always used to be at my fingertips, certainly including names, and now I have to reach for them. Sure, the last kid who still lives with me, I can hang onto his name, and the names of our dogs, but much beyond that and I’m either playing the “sounds like” game in my head or free-associating:  “Hm. I know I did this with this person, and those other people were there, and I remember these things about that time, so the name is attached there somewhere in my brain….” And at some point, I get it.

Yesterday, I spent the day in a meeting room with two other members of the Counterintuity team and the facilitator we’ve hired to lead us in some extensive planning. Early in the day, the name Steve Jobs came up, as it inevitably does when you’re discussing vision and leadership and the intersection of tech and creativity. I’m of the strong opinion that Jobs was a needlessly terrible person, and that his terribleness is unconnected with his success — i.e., he didn’t need to be that way to achieve much of what he did. Others heard me, and then we moved on. Meanwhile, this stated opinion of mine led me down a rabbit hole of conjecture about Steve Jobs, and the nature of being terrible, and how awful he was to his illegitimate daughter and his legitimate business partner and select employees and even the idea that he needed to be a responsible member of society, and then my thoughts wound around to his early employer, who always made a place for Jobs to succeed because he could see Jobs’ potential, and even though Jobs, as a barefoot, stinking, only-eating-carrots hippie had driven everyone else crazy at the workplace, this brilliant entrepreneur whom I admire arranged for Jobs to work a night shift all his own, wherein he succeeded. Yes, I’d been an admirer of this visionary business leader for many years, the man who founded both Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, and of course I was thinking of….

And that’s when I blanked.

Meanwhile, of course, the meeting was going on and I was fully participating — at least outwardly — although I saw this very smart facilitator look at me repeatedly because he saw my eyes doing the upward-left look, which signifies either lying (but I wasn’t saying anything) or imagination. Imagination is related to conjuration, and I was trying to conjure up the name of this business leader I’d learned about in the 80s and followed off-and-on ever since.

My hand itched, naturally, because I was ready to pluck my iPhone from my pocket and type in “Chuck E. Cheese,” and then there it would be, presto:  the owner’s name. But I knew I knew his name — it was lodged somewhere in my memories, so all I had to do was retrieve it. And, hey, I’d be at this event of our own making for another nine hours, so at some point it would come to me.

This happens to all of us, the delayed memory. Fishing for a word or a name and then, hours later, unprompted, it comes to us. But in this case, I was determined to work for it and not to take the easy route and look it up on the wonder killer (invented, ironically, by Steve Jobs’s company). So, in off moments, I started jotting down little bits related to this guy.

“Chuck E. Cheese.”

“Atari.”

And I remembered Steve Jobs, and the story that he’d decided to eat nothing but carrots for two weeks, which turned his complexion orange. And that he smelled so bad that no one else would work with him, so he got that night shift. And the name of the guy who was determined to keep the brilliant young Steve Jobs employed was…

Mason.

Mason?

It wasn’t Mason, but I wrote it down.

Maybe half an hour or more later, “Gordon” came to me.

Gordon?

It wasn’t Gordon. But if it wasn’t Mason, and it wasn’t Gordon, it at least ended in an “uhn” sound.  Memories attach to other related memories, so fishing up bits of context is a reliable way of remembering something. If I could just figure out that first name, the rest would come. Except now I was struggling to think of other names like “Mason” and “Gordon.” This grew into such a distraction that I kept itching to pull out that iPhone. Finally, I just set it aside. It would come to me — or it wouldn’t — but for now, I needed to focus.

Finally, I had it. The name just came to me, in a flash of not-thinking. Just setting it aside took care of it.

I had been thinking of Nolan Bushnell.

Total time to remember his name? (I wrote down the starting time.) An hour and forty-five minutes.

There are two lessons here:  1. Yes, all those memories are indeed still stored in  your head. You can retrieve them.  2. But sometimes, it’s much faster just to use your iPhone.

My 17-year-old son had plans today to spend the day with some friends. Getting ready to take a shower, he asked, “Do you mind if I play some music?”

I was lying down in the adjoining bedroom, hanging out with the dogs and reading.

“No,” I said, bracing myself for some harsh rap.

But instead I heard some sort of modern rock come on. It sounded pretty good! In fact, song after song sounded pretty good. I recognized the Killers, a band I like, and some others; one song summoned a sense of familiarity, but I couldn’t place it, so I got closer and hit the Shazam app on my phone and found it was by Foster the People. Of course! It sounded just like Foster the People, and I like Foster the People. I went back to my reading.

When he came out of the shower, I called for him. He came into the room. I was thrilled to hear all this new music and wanted to share my excitement. I’ve been concerned that I was finally falling behind in what’s current in music, or what I could relate to — but this was good stuff! Maybe I’d find out what it was and load it onto my phone.

“Hey!” I said. “I liked what you were playing. In fact, I liked all of what you were playing! That was really good.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s the music of my childhood.”

“Huh?”

“The music of my childhood. That music is from the 2000’s. My childhood.” Then he left.

Well, it’s still new music to me.

I could probably write a book about my experiences with my gym, and maybe, with this blog, I am. After all, I’ve written here about possible mistaken identities, the lack of soap, shit in the showers, and so much more.

Just after writing that last post, I decided to fulfill my pledge of earlier that day to absolutely, positively, go to the gym. Even though it was 11 p.m. As I’ve said here before, one of the things I like about 24 Hour Fitness is that 24 hour part. It eliminates excuses. No matter when you’re ready, the gym is there and open.

My usual habit at the gym is this:  I start with 20 minutes of “stretching,” which includes setups, planking, some other things, and about 10 minutes on a diabolical bicycle-like thing that contorts you into various positions as you tilt all the way back, like something being dumped into an imaginary hamper; follow with a circuit of lifting, then cardio. Because I don’t wear ear buds or head phones, or fiddle around with my iPhone — I’m not there to exercise my thumbs — I’m completely alone with my thoughts. During the cardio portion, my thoughts are generally this:  “Man, I can’t wait to get home and have a beer.” After cardio, I change into my swimsuit, shower off, use the steam room, shower off again, use the jacuzzi, then take a full-on actual shower after first using the swim-a-rator, or whatever it’s called, to drain the water from my swimsuit.

On this particular night I’m mentioning, I come out from jacuzzi and I’m standing there naked straining my swim suit in the swim-a-rator. A white haired little guy, also naked, comes over and stands slightly behind and next to me and looks at me, and says, “It’s cold standing there, no?”

I wonder what he means by that.

I tell him that I don’t think the swimsuit strainer is working well.

He says, “Are you from Russia?”

I say, “No, I’m from New Jersey. Where are you from?”

“I’m from Russia,” he says.

I think, gee, being from New Jersey, I can always tell a New Jersey accent; if this guy is from Russia, why can’t he tell I don’t have a Russian accent? He seems less Russian to me than… Armenian or something. I know a guy from the former Soviet Union whose country disappeared when the U.S.S.R. broke up. He’s not from Russia; he’s from one of the little satellite areas that no longer exists by that name or identity. He’s told me its name several times, but I can’t remember it and it no longer exists to look on a map. A similar thing happened to Franz Kafka, by the way – complete alienation from place – as a Jew growing up in an empire that dissolved in his lifetime, and speaking the language of his oppressor. So, now, whenever I see the guy from the country that no longer exists, I think of Franz Kafka. For a moment, I wonder if the man who says he’s from Russia is also actually from a country that no longer exists.

I’m thinking this while wondering if he’s ogling me.

I move away and go to weigh myself – once again, I’m the same weight I have been, which is simultaneously comforting and disappointing – and when I return holding a towel because I’m headed to the showers, the man is there again.

“How old are you?” he asks.

I’m wondering if, being from “Russia,” he doesn’t know how impertinent this is. “How old are you?” I ask.

“You first,” he says.

“57. Your turn.”

“I am 60,” he says. To me, he looks older. Do I really look three years younger than he does? And why am I having this conversation, both with him and in my head with myself?

“You look very good,” he says. “You have a good body. You are built.”

(I’m not.)

“Uhh, thanks,” I say. “Thanks.”

Then I walk to the showers, still naked, and go to a shower cubicle and close the door tightly.

When I come out, he’s gone.

Three weeks later, I haven’t seen him again. Not that I’m looking. Not that I would need to. I suspect he’d announce himself.