My friend Bill is an actor and playwright. Here’s something he just shared:

My mother, Florence, ninety, passed away tonight after a long illness. I was in rehearsal three thousand miles away. She said she’d see us on the other side but had “to go to a summer job.” She asked where was I, her eldest son. My siblings told her that I was starring in a show. She smiled and passed away, they tell me. I loved her very much, she was my initial audience, my reader, my safe harbor, my inspiration, my teacher.

Dramatists live for good dialogue, strong images, and fitting resolutions. I love Florence’s line that she had “to go to a summer job.” (Great metaphor!) And then, when she hears that her son is starring in a show, she smiles and passes away. Great exit.

Werner Herzog’s new documentary concerns capital punishment, and specifically two men on death row. I haven’t seen it yet — and passed up an opportunity Saturday night to see a screening of it followed by a Q&A with Herzog because I’m hoping to see the film with my son this weekend while I’m in San Francisco — but I’m eager to. Patrick Goldstein gives us a profile of Herzog and this new film. Best quote from it:

Being a journalist myself, I wanted to better understand Herzog’s own very public refusal to embrace capital punishment. He has repeatedly said that, as much as he loves living in America, he will not become a U.S. citizen as long as the country puts people to death.

“It is not a statement just about America,” he reminds me. “I cannot become a Chinese, Japanese, Russian or Egyptian citizen either, since they practice capital punishment too. I am from Germany, a country, in the time of the Nazis, that conducted an enormous campaign of capital punishment against its own citizens, and on top of that, carried out genocide against 6 million Jews. So from my standpoint, no state should be allowed to kill its citizens.”

If you’re on Facebook — and most likely you are — you may find this useful. Here’s some background on the hack/spam attack on Facebook that may have already phished your address book, and what you can do to protect yourself from these problems.

This is scarily relevant to my homelife. Except in our case, part of the iPad tussle is the children trying to pry it away from their mother, not the other way around.

I first saw it on Facebook last week:  the idea that we should post a daily tribute to something we are grateful for. Now dozens of my Friends are participating.

How did this get started? Who first decided that he was such an ingrate that he had to just go on the record and atone for 30 days? And what does this mini movement say about us? That we on Facebook are a world of ingrates? (Doubtless:  Here we are issuing semi-apologies from the comfort of our personal social media while 1 out of every 6 people on the planet can’t even get a drink of clean water.) But how does recognizing something you’re grateful for every day on Facebook address the situation? Facebook isn’t a person, and gratitude expressed to an integrated suite of software algorithms doesn’t exactly lift your character; there is no Mr. Facebook to receive your gratitude. There is only an audience – us – and perhaps that’s what this is about:  our seeing you confess your lacking in a superficial way.

Here’s a random sampling of what I’ve seen:

“I am grateful and thankful for my friends, my family, the love I am given and the love I am able to give away.”

“Grateful for places of beauty and wonder….and the ability to enjoy them.”

“I am grateful for the rain, the clouds, the sky and the beauty it all brings.”

“I AM GREATFUL THAT WE ARE RECEIVING ALL THE DIVINE GUIDANCE ALL THE WAY TO THE INTERNET SO IT CAN SPREAD FAST AND LOVE WILL ALWAYS PREVAIL. NAMASTE.”

Here’s what really bugs me about this. My personal experience of human beings, my five decades of personal interaction with and observation of the species, tells me that these things are most assuredly not what they are grateful (or “greatful”) for.  If people were honest here’s what they would tell you what they were grateful for:

•    Nail clippers
•    Fried chicken
•    Electricity
•    Beer
•    Chocolate
•    Shoes that fit
•    Hair that looks good that day
•    Hot running water
•    Coffee
•    Sex
•    A pen that writes when you pick it up
•    Paved roads
•    Wifi
•    Soap, on themselves and other people

To name just a few. So why do people instead list rivers, fluffy clouds, kitty cats, goodness and the rest? So we can see how noble they are.

I grew up out in nature, and let me tell you, it’s a jungle out there. People have been known to die in it. Nature has two, um, natural states:  deadly and boring. I’ve seen them both. I’ve been attacked by wild stags, snapper turtles, rattlesnakes, jellyfish, horseshoe crabs and any number and disposition of insects. I’ve also fallen into sink holes, had trees fall down near me, gotten lost or broken down and run low on water, and once or twice almost got caught in a fire. This sort of thing provides the excitement; the rest of the time, it’s dull. Think of all the movies you’ve seen where people are picnicking out in a field. What provided the entertainment? The people and the food – both of which were brought out into that field. The field supplied nothing. That’s what most of nature is:  a lot of nothing. I don’t mind fishing in it, but I have to bring the fishing pole, the tackle, the cigars, lunch, and so forth; without my effort, there’s no experience worth having.  Believe me. I’ve tried. Movies that reflect what I know to be true about nature:  “Grizzly Man.” “127 Hours.” “Touching the Void.” Each of them far more terrifying than any Hollywood horror movie.

So I’m grateful for the indoors. For indoor plumbing and for toilet paper. For the internet and cafes. For hand-rolled cigars. For a good steak. For red wine. For Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. For t-shirts. For newspapers. For museums. For bottle openers. For a good free parking spot. For all  the things that actually make life worth living.

Yesterday I had to reprimand my 9-year-old, again, for being a smartass and talking back:  to his teacher, to the afterschool ladies, to his sister, to his mother, to me. (A little wise talk can be appreciated, even admired if it’s clever; a surfeit is annoying.)

Then this morning my wife decided to do a little personal sharing with him. She told him that she’d been reprimanded the night before at work for speaking back to a supervisor, and that his father, me, “can’t keep a quip to himself. So I know where you get it from.” Instantly, I said, “You should always quip while you’re ahead.”

I’m thinking this kid has more grief ahead of him.

First there was cut-up, courtesy of Brion Gysin, which gave us new poetry without human direction.

Then there were spambots, delivering broken and elliptical little messages culled from people’s hard drives and issued out across the world like dented sperm trying to take root.

Now, I predict, we’re entering an age where Apple’s new virtual assistant Siri will be composing blank verse for us. Here’s an example, from my Facebook Friend (capital “f”) Terry Kinney (have we met, Terry? I think so):

I’m well and out I just like that Destrier 520 to pick up 123 why did you kill a cloud through proximate lead again. We’ll be looking”

Terry reports that Siri was apparently texting this message to Terry’s friend Doug.

Looks like the language poets like Jorie Graham can call it a day. They’ve been replaced.

Pretty much every Sunday that I’m not traveling, I solve the expert-level mega Sudoku puzzle found at WashingtonPost.com . It usually takes an hour or so.

It’s now Monday evening at almost 10 p.m., and I’ve only just finished the one from yesterday. I couldn’t get it yesterday, and had to restart this evening.

In other words, it was one of the toughest I’ve come across.

Here it is, in case you’ve got  several hours you need to kill.

I’ve noted here before (precisely, here and here) how, um, idiosyncratic airline security measures are here in the U.S.  You’d have better luck calling the drop at a roulette table than knowing what to expect going through a security line. Now TSA Administrator John Poole says he’s concluded the equivalent of a listening tour, and is going to implement some changes, including turning the question of whether or not to frisk kids over to the discretion of individual screeners. But that doesn’t exactly sound like a better process, does it?

Early this evening, just before running down to Moving Arts for the latest set of readings from my playwriting workshop, I finished Julian Barnes’ new novel, The Sense of an Ending. I was deeply struck by the book, which among other things concerns 40 years’ of misunderstandings by our narrator and his immediate circle. Things that happen during school days and immediately afterward are reinterpreted decades later with emotionally devastating results for the protagonist. Much of the book concerns emails back and forth between that protagonist and a former paramour. And tonight, before those readings, I received an email that showed just how deft and resonant the novel is.

The night before, I had gone to a reading by my friend, and also my grad-school professor, David Scott Milton. David’s new novel, Iron City, has just been published by another friend of mine, Christopher Meeks, who is also a former student of David’s.  I took my 9-year-old son Dietrich with me, and bought him a couple of books to keep him occupied and also distracted from what I imagined, judging from David’s previous work, would be a  reading from a novel with lots of sex and violence (an assumption proved right, as the detective in his novel haggles over money with a bar full of prostitutes. Dietrich asked me later what a prostitute is and I told him, “A person who has sex for money,” to which he replied, “Oh, that’s right.” No doubt I had already explained this to him. Or he’d heard it on TV. Or on the playground. Who knows? There’s no sense in saving anything for adulthood any more.) At the reading, I also saw one of my own former grad students. I was surprised to see her, but went up to her and embraced her and said hello. Immediately after the reading I looked for her, but couldn’t find her; evidently she had left right away, and somehow I knew it was because of me. When I got home, I emailed her:

Subject: Nice seeing you tonight.

Nice seeing you tonight, however briefly. I looked for you afterward — wanted to find out what you’ve been up to — but you had left.

And, as I said, tonight, just after finishing the Barnes novel about misunderstandings and misinterpretations, I got this reply:

Hi, Lee,

Thanks for writing this… I felt that you didn’t want to talk to me, and it saddened me.

Always too sensitive… the only good part about that is that I can write.

So she had seen something in me, something in my face, that she read this way. And, to some degree, she was right in seeing what she’d seen, but wrong in the interpretation. Here’s what she had seen cross my face:  Oh no, what’s her name? Yes, I was glad to see her — but I was mentally fishing for her name.  Once I had it, I was even more eager to see her, to prove that of course I remembered her and wanted to speak to her and now had her name, but she had gone. I remember her distinctly, of course, and believe I was her thesis advisor (or was that David?), I remember her plays and many other things, but for a moment I couldn’t remember her first name, and didn’t want to embarrass her or hurt her feelings, and she mistook that for something else, and that misapprehension actually did hurt her feelings.

David is 77. When I was his student, from 1988 to 1990, we would play racquetball; he was a better shot, and had a better serve; the only way I could win was to run him to ground, to wind him, because he was 28 years older than I. Now someone in his 20s could do this to me. After his reading, we talked briefly. I told him that I’d seen X. He said, “I was trying to remember her last name.” I said, “Really? I was trying to remember the first one.”

In Julian Barnes’ book, the protagonist is shaken to discover that not only was he not the person he believed he was early in life, he may not be the person he now believes himself to be. If character is changeable, and if our self-perceptions are wrong, how are we ever to understand each other, if not ourselves?