It’s finally happened: I’ve lost my sense of humor. About one thing, at least.

The other morning as I was driving my son to take his driver’s license test, we passed a billboard for the new Oliver Stone movie, “W.” Guess who it’s about.

“Dad, are you going to go see that?”

“No,” I said rigidly.

“It looks really funny in the trailer.”

“There’s nothing funny about him,” I said, noting to myself the irony of the word “trailer” in connection with the infamous subject of this film. “Trailer” as in “FEMA trailer.” As in: rusting hulks bought for too much money from private contractors for the scattered survivors of Hurricane Katrina. More reasons not to be amused.

In today’s LA Times I came across a caption about the movie that said it was the story of one man’s rise “from riches to more riches.” I guess that’s humorous too.

I haven’t lost my sense of humor about everything. I’m always cracking wise on those marathon training runs; it’s a good way to deal with the seeming impossibility of running dozens of miles, or other ordeals. I’ve written comedies about cancer and suicide and incest, and even my recent play about the son of a serial killer was good for a few laughs. But it’s hard to imagine anything funny about “W.” or the creature the film is named after. Maybe the scale of impact is too great to laugh away. The serial killer in my play killed a few dozen women; the Bush death count is in the hundreds of thousands (Iraqi civilians; Afghani civilians; U.S. soldiers; Katrina victims; old folks shooting themselves because their retirement has been wiped out and they can’t pay the mortgage; and on and on). I don’t think I’m alone in this sentiment: I don’t want to spend any more time with him, real or fictional.

Except in one case.

If there is a sequel, one in which he’s tried and convicted, I will gladly buy a ticket. Many of them.

I don’t think I’m alone in that, either.

Sent in by my father-in-law. Like all jokes, there’s a regrettable truth at the end.

While walking down the street one day a Senator is tragically hit by a truck and dies.

The devil comes over to him and puts his arm around his shoulder.

“I don’t understand,” stammers the politician.  “Yesterday I was here and there was a golf course and clubhouse, and we ate lobster and caviar, drank champagne, and danced and had a great time.  Now there’s just a wasteland full of garbage and my friends look miserable.
What happened?”

Today you voted.”

How much money do U.S. taxpayers owe? So much that the debt clock has run out of digits.

Thanks to Paul Crist for sending this in.

As I noted previously, the lack of outrage is inhuman. Which, in Obama’s case, someone else has already pointed out.

That AIDS Marathon I keep blogging about is just around the corner. On Sunday the 19th I’ll be running 26.2 miles in Amsterdam to benefit AIDS Project LA.

But tomorrow night I’ll be drinking drinks and playing Rock Band. Please join me at Fubar in West Hollywood between 6:30 and 9. See below.

By the way:  Afraid of that infamous West Hollywood parking (or lack thereof)? Not to worry. We’ve arranged for 50 individual parking permits. If you can join us, shoot me an email and I’ll have a runner stand by at the curb with a parking pass.

(Can’t make it to the event? Well, you won’t get to hear me sing “Anarchy in the U.K.” But you can still sponsor me. The donations go to help people suffering with HIV / AIDS and who have no health insurance. A big thank-you to everyone who has sponsored me already.)

I watched the second presidential debate tonight. Or was it a rerun of the first debate? Sure seemed that way. I’ll bet if you spliced together the sound bites from each debate, they’re the same.

What should have been different was the level of outrage.

Even overlooking all the other crimes and malfeasance of the past eight years — invading a foreign country that didn’t attack us; stripping away civil liberties; sanctioning torture; letting people starve or drown after Hurricane Katrina; stealing two elections; oh, this would be an endless list — the rape and pillage of the treasury on the way out the door must, finally, break the camel’s back. The John McCain I remember prior to this campaign would have been aghast. And I would think that the Democratic nominee would be too.

I understand that Obama’s goal is to get elected, and not to give me a thrill by speaking harsh hot truth in front of millions of people. But I ask this:  Once he gets elected, can he show some outrage then? Please? I appreciate the cool demeanor and the thoughtfulness (what a refreshing change that would be in the top position). But at some point true leadership gets royally pissed off at injustice. And we’re past that point. I know I am.

Further proof that a) Barack Obama is cool; and b) that he’s in it to win it: He’s got his own iPhone app.

Last night, good friend Trey Nichols and I went to see David Byrne perform at the Greek Theatre here in Los Angeles. Neither of us had high expectations; it just seemed like a good opportunity for two friends to hear some music, then later share drinks and cigars. We got all that — and one of the best concerts we’ve ever attended. Only very occasionally in live performance are you present for an event where everyone on stage reaches a transcendent level, the audience takes note and feeds more energy and enthusiasm to the performers, and then the performers notch it even higher. Last night was one of those nights. Four songs in, when he had already received a much-deserved standing ovation, the normally taciturn Byrne looked into the crowd, grinned broadly, and scratched his head. That image of unreserved bewilderment and joy was transmitted to the outdoor amphitheatre’s big screens, eliciting a swell of applause and cheers from us all. David Byrne has always been cool. Last night, he was hot.

He’s touring to promote his new album with Brian Eno, “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today,” which I’ve been plugging here. I like the album enormously. On this tour, Byrne is performing songs from his 30-year history with Eno, which includes three Talking Heads albums (“More Songs About Buildings and Food,” “Fear of Music,” and “Remain in Light” ), the revelatory “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” song selections from “The Catherine Wheel,” and this new album. I’ve always been an enormous fan of their collaboration; until last night, I hadn’t realized it had been more than 30 years of music. Tempus fugit.

This Wikipedia page devoted to the tour details the exact set list. I had no doubt that the set list was tightly choreographed — literally — because the songs are accompanied by three young dancers. They crawl, they dance, they leap, they line up, they swivel around in office chairs. If this sounds distracting, it isn’t — it’s enhancing. It’s also so cleanly delivered, so practiced, so perfectly on the beat, that there’s no room for improv (hence the ironclad set list). What Byrne didn’t anticipate, though, was the sort of reaction he got last night, which necessitated a third encore, which included “Burning Down the House.” (A “non-Eno” song.)

For me, the night was memorable for another reason. I’ve spent a lot of years with David Byrne (and, indeed, saw Talking Heads on one of their final engagements on the “Stop Making Sense” tour some time in the 1980’s). I’ve also spent a lot of years — almost 15 of them — with Trey Nichols. After the show we did go out for those cigars and drinks, driving that long winding drive up the mountain in Burbank with my convertible top down to The Castaway, a restaurant that provides an encompassing visual purchase of this end of the valley. We sat there out on the ledge and drank and blew smoke and looked over all the lights far below and shared personal epiphanies about one artistic expression after another — in music, or art, or literature, or theatre — that grabbed us. We had so many in common it was impossible to keep count. (One example:  Trey mentioned the Clubfoot Orchestra in passing; he had seen them accompany “Nosferatu,” “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” and “Metropolis” in Berkeley in the late 1980’s, while I had seen them accompany “Sherlock, Jr.” and Felix the Cat shorts at Silent Movie in Los Angeles in the early 90’s.) Trey remarked upon how astonishing those Eno/Talking Heads albums were when they were new, and how little or nothing has surpassed them, and I reached back to my naivete and said, “Do you remember thinking that music was going to get better and better?” As we closed the bar and moved down the hillside to the parking lot where we finished our drinks and cigars, I remembered first meeting Trey at an event we were both reading in in 1995 and being struck by both his words and his presence in reading them and fully hearing all that potential and power that lay beneath. (My first thought: “Oh, no, a play about football.” My second thought: “No, wait. This is a play by someone smart enough to write a play that pretends to be about football, but isn’t.”)

I drove  us back to my house, where he had parked his car, and we shook hands before he left. I carried inside the rocks glass I had stolen from the Castaway:  a keepsake of the evening. Someone once said that when a friend dies, a library burns down — all those references are lost. My personal archive includes several experiences with David Byrne’s music — and many, many events with Trey Nichols.

Earlier this year I wrote a short play called “About the Deep Woods Killer.” If you think it was about the Deep Woods Killer, you would be wrong — it was more about his now-grown son and the emotional wreckage he’s inherited, and it was perhaps even more about a young woman he meets who is strangely drawn to troubled men. (And, indeed, the full-length version I’m now working on is called “Troubled Men.”) The story is very loosely based upon the Green River Killer, whose story I came across on MSNBC in my hotel room in April. The Green River Killer lured women down by the river and killed them. This went on for 20 years. Estimates of his rampage vary.

I changed the setting from river to woods because while I know something about rivers, I grew up in the woods. To me, the river is metaphoric for journey (think “Huckleberry Finn”), while the woods are metaphoric for the subconscious, and how deep you can go. (Here’s an old logic puzzle:  “How far can a dog run into the woods?” “Halfway. After that, he’s running out.”) In my play, nobody’s getting out — but they do go deeper. Hence the woods.

A minute ago I was Stumbling around the internet and found the image below. Stumble promises to find things on the Web that you’re interested in but which you didn’t know about. In this case, I experienced a frisson when I saw the image. I know someone did it for a lark — it’s posted on some “humor” page — but given my play, I read it differently.