A post from my friend Doug Hackney made me aware of this:  a slideshow of the last Jew in Afghanistan. He has survived the Soviets, and thus far he has survived the Taliban.

As a fan of peaceful coexistence, what I like about this is his picture with the friend observing Mecca.

That, plus the sheer stones of deciding to be the last representative of your people in a hostile environment.

Rush Limbaugh is trying to buy the Rams.

No doubt to eat them.

My family and I have been preparing for a camping trip. We’re stocking up on supplies, and just bought a roundtrip plane ticket for our son in college so he can join us.

Here’s a recent photo of where we’ve been planning to go.

We’re now scouting out alternative locations.

I’ve complained lots of times in my life about the post office (and if you know me, you know my favorite sobriquet for the service is the Post Awful). Why? Because, obviously, I love it. I have eagerly awaited the mail every delivery day of my life as long as I can remember. I remember the thrill at age 10 of getting the latest jiffy pack of vintage comics ordered from comics dealer Robert Bell delivered to my door in southern New Jersey from the impossibly distant Hauppauge, NY. (And can still remember specifically one of the comics received that way, Fantastic Four #54.) I discovered RBCC (Rocket’s Blast Comic Collector) in an ad in Marvel comics, thereafter receiving that magazine in the mail. That introduced me to all of fandom, and to several important close relationships, and to publishing my own fanzines, and to getting paid to appear in print. And how did I get paid? Most of my life, right up to this point, it’s been through the mail. The same as my father, who also haunted the mailbox.

So:  just so you know, all my complaints about the post office are those of a lover who has discovered romance and expects it to be as deeply fulfilling every time as it once was. I’m excited to arrive home and find that either The New Yorker or a comic book has  arrived in the mail, and I’m disappointed when it hasn’t. It’s a misplaced disappointment — the post office has nothing to do with publishing timetables — but love doesn’t truckle with reason.

What brings this on is a depressing exchange I had recently with a good friend. Depressing because I found myself confessing at length that I had no use for first-class stamps, no matter how attractive and perfectly suited to my own interests. My rational side explained the situation; my emotional side was revulsed by my own argument. What occasioned this was yet another plea from my friend to go out and buy some of those cool first-class stamps that the post office is now constantly issuing (in the hopes of boosting sales). Yes, I bought a pane of the DC comics stamps and admired their beauty. Yes, I bought a pane of the Marvel comics stamps (although I was puzzled by the choice of some of the characters depicted). But in each case I then found I had no use for them. So when my friend recommended buying the new stamps of classic TV stars, here was my unfortunately smartass reply:

Please let me know how to load these into the Pitney Bowes machine at my office. ‘Cause I would love to be printing these out on statements, payments, etc. (Which provides the entirety of my outgoing first-class mail.)

Yeah, nice, huh? Not my proudest moment. For 30 years and more, it has been hard to drub out the unfortunate early influence of reading so much Harlan Ellison; it pains me to see it there again, and deployed on a friend.

My even-tempered (and revered) good friend responded this way:

Lee, Those stamps are for when you send love notes, birthday cards, or words of wisdom.  The artistical postage adds immeasurably to the effectualness.

Yes. And then here was my response, which included other friends by now on this thread:

Love notes don’t require postage. If they’re to my wife, they’re distributed here at  home. (If they were to someone else, I doubt I’d want my return address, or other proof of origin, so they wouldn’t be mailed.)

I don’t send birthday cards. Did anyone on this email get one? I think not.

Words of wisdom. Well, as proved with this communication, I send these electronically. (In this way, or on my blog.) [Note:  this is more of that Ellison influence.]

As we all know, I love the mail. And I — I! — barely use it. I like the idea of trains, too, but other than subways, I haven’t ridden a train in about 10 years. And then it was too slow and too costly. (This, however, is a US problem. The trains in Europe are remarkable — inexpensive, fast and convenient.) I think the roundtrip from Los Angeles to San Diego on the Sunliner, with restricted hours, and requiring leaving one’s car somewhere, is almost $100. For that, I’ll drive the 125 miles each way.

The one non-business first-class communication I do still send — the sympathy card — I can’t imagine adding a Simpsons stamp to.

I bought a pane of those Marvel comics stamps and found I had almost no use for them. When postage went up, I was still trying to use them — and now had to buy “helper” stamps.

Sorry. I like the idea of them, but stamps are a utilitarian product, and for me at least, they no longer have any utility.

Feeling sad,

Lee

So there it is. I am one of the people killing the post office. And I love the post office — and am willing to admit it this once. This is merely the latest of my ungrateful crimes:

• I love newspapers, but I’m not buying them
• I love books, but don’t go to bookstores
• I love music, but don’t go to music stores
• I love my community, but I buy almost all non-grocery items online

When was the last time I mailed a letter? I can’t remember. Worse, I haven’t gotten around to reading the last one I received (!). As someone who believes in personal responsibility, its flip side must hold true, so I don’t believe in suffering free-floating guilt. I wish people weren’t getting massacred all over the globe, and I’d like to fix that somehow, but because I’m not doing the killing myself, I don’t feel guilty. With these other, smaller, matters I am partly culpable. But in a society in which convenience, formerly costly, has also become cheaper, in which the digital download of intellectual property is faster and less expensive and less polluting than the physical object, I don’t hold out any hope for the tangible future of books or newspapers or music or stamps. Feeling bad won’t change that.

• A nice piece on the 10th-anniversary release of Takashi Miike’s “Audition.” Don’t read the story if you haven’t seen the film. But do see the film, and try to be utterly unprepared.
• A somewhat useless overview of Joel and Ethan Coen’s oeuvre. The online headline:  “Just accept the mystery.” (In the print version:  “Mystery in the making.”) To headline a piece “Just accept the mystery” is to say, “I don’t know what to make of this.” Which begs the question:  then why write about it? (And yes, before you email me, I realize that an editor headlined it.)
• Douglas Brinkley reviews the new Clinton presidency book, Taylor Branch’s “The Clinton Tapes,” and decides that “our country benefited from his robust leadership.” Which makes me pause to wonder if he hasn’t slid from book reviewer to partisan advocate. An interview with the author by NPR’s Terry Gross coincided more closely with my own remembrance:  some real accomplishments, matched with a dogged determination to filter everything through the prism of personal crisis — the president’s own. If Clinton was, to use Brinkley’s assertion, a “political genius and a dazzling player with cunning pragmatism and spot-on observations,” why didn’t his mirror ever tell him how Monica Lewinsky and Jennifer Flowers and Whitewater and Lincoln Bedroom donations and lying under oath and on and on would be used against him to the detriment of us all? This doesn’t sound like “robust leadership.” It sounds like Shakespearean tragedy.
• Finally, the California section — now slimmed down and appearing only once a week like a diminished doppelganger of its namesake — carries a story about the success of San Francisco’s city-run universal health care effort. This is typical of the smart effective program’s the city has seen under Mayor Gavin Newsom, and reflect why I’m supporting him for governor.

Here’s actor Bostin Christopher’s take on how he got cast in my play “He Said She Said,” which opens next Saturday here in Los Angeles. My quick response:  Yes, I wrote it with him in mind — and yes, he still had to audition for the role.

Why?

Because the director, in this case Ross Kramer, had never seen him. Never even met him. So while I had the benefit of seeing Bostin’s work in a variety of venues the past two years, it would have been a lot to ask someone else to cast him sight unseen. That was my thinking anyway. And how much do I trust this director? I didn’t even go to the auditions.  I’ve worked with lots of different directors, and I can’t think of another time in 30 years of getting produced that a play of mine was auditioning in town and I didn’t go.

So here’s the thing:  Bostin is terrific in my play. Unsurprisingly, he’s doing a good  job of playing a role that I wrote with him in mind. As for the female role, I saw that one very differently than how Rebecca Davis is playing it (and how Ross is directing it), but now that I’ve seen this take it’ll be extremely hard to see it any other way. Until, that is, I do. Nobody wants his play to be done just once.

What playwrights do want, though, is for their plays to be done well, with a director and actors bringing things to the production that add to the experience.  Playwrights who get productions in which people detract from the experience know exactly what I’m talking about. My first production was in high school and went fine; for my first production in college I was saddled with a female lead whose habit it was to deliver every line like a crazed magpie: “Got any MAG-a-ziiiiinnnnnes?” Some years ago in New York a director decided that my play about artists in hiding from the government actually was about a lesbian subtext that he freely invented — and directed for accordingly. (On opening night, the cast and I, by now thoroughly creeped out by this guy, ditched him for our own party elsewhere.)

I’ve got more such stories — you do this long enough and you collect them. But I’ve also had many productions that left me awash with gratitude. To fly in somewhere, especially a small town, and see how hard and how well they’ve worked on your play, how much they’ve committed and achieved, leaves you humbled.  Whatever alchemy produced the run-through I saw of this new play of mine the other night, I’m grateful for it.

In reviewing Forbes’ latest list of the 400 wealthiest Americans, I came across this:

Newcomers to the list include Marvel Entertainment chief Isaac Perlmutter, whose net worth soared to $1.55 billion after Disney agreed to buy the superhero outfit in August for $4 billion in cash and stock.

Neither Jack Kirby nor his heirs seem to have made the list.

And here’s why I think Jerry has now filed those “exploratory” papers. Given the opportunity to run against this particular pack of GOP candidates, Goofus could win.

Hey, Jerry Brown has taken out papers to run for governor of California.

But wait, it seems he’s actually only exploring.

So I guess it’s still too early for him to hit me up for money.

Tickets are now available for that extra-long, extra-wide one-act festival that opens (or, begins opening) next week here in Los Angeles. (The one that has me out at rehearsals and tech rehearsals and dress rehearsals and so forth at all hours.)

My play “He Said She Said” is part of “Passions,” which is a “Keystone” event; I’m directing “Move” by Trey Nichols on the same night; I’m directing “The Incident Report” by EM Lewis as part of the “Special Presentation” called “Flight”; and word has it I’m writing one of the segments of the “Spotlight” event “Arachnatopia” at the Natural History Museum. (Which means I’d better start writing it.) Can’t follow all that? Go to this link and… just buy all of it.

Hope to see you there.