On a day when Donald J. Trump officially gets elected president of the United States, and the Russian ambassador is assassinated in Turkey, I think we all need to look at the 50 comic books that are going to be available to you for free on Free Comic Book Day next May 6.
So here they are. Enjoy.
Yesterday at 5 p.m. I got a reminder on my phone to go pick up my dry cleaning. I especially needed it because I would be giving remarks at a swearing-in ceremony today and I figured I’d need one of those shirts. So I set off to drive the couple of miles to my preferred dry cleaner.
On one of the local surface streets, a two-lane affair incongruously named Whitnall Highway, I found that I was inching along behind a very slow-moving maroon SUV. So when the SUV slowed down even more in order to go over a rather unnecessary speed bump, I pulled into the left lane, passed, and left it behind me.
I kept driving for a while before I began to gather that the SUV was now following me.
When I got to a street light and turned left, it turned left.
When I got to another corner, a small side street, and made a right and it followed me onto that small side street, I was sure.
Finally, I pulled into my friendly local dry cleaner’s, a small business run by a husband and wife who, finally, were able to leave various war-torn Middle Eastern countries behind and arrive in the United States. (I asked the husband at one point where he was from, and got quite a detailed list of the wars and turmoil they’d left behind.) I got out of my car and as I was closing the door, the maroon SUV pulled up behind me on the street. I heard a voice and turned around to see a snarling, twisted-face middle-aged woman absolutely consumed with anger.
“You fucking piece of shit,” she said.
“What?” I said. I said “what” because I couldn’t figure out what else to say.
“You heard me,” she said. “You’re a fucking piece of shit.”
Whether or not that’s true isn’t best determined by me myself, so I sauntered over to learn more.
She hurled more imprecations at me, claiming that the source of her misery was my having passed her. Legally, I might add, and at the speed limit. What I am sure to be true is this: She is the source of her own misery. If she’s unhappy because I passed her, one can only estimate how she reacts to more consequential things. Her response to this was so great, that I have to figure she exerts a planetary gravitational pull that sucks terrible things into her life. As a friend of mine said today when I told him about this incident, “This is the sort of person who, if a satellite fell out of the sky, it would land on her.”
I approached her window. Honestly, I was so curious, all I wanted to do was figure out why she was having this response — and maybe using it in a play some day. But as I drew near, she looked alarmed and unsure what I might do. So she started to roll up her window and drive away. I shouted out the only thing that came to mind, the thing that seemed most appropriate and most sure to torment her: “Merry Christmas!”
What I did not do — and probably should have — was that when she launched into her pointless pursuit of me, pointless because I wasn’t trying to evade her and because she accomplished nothing other than further contributing to the ruin of her own day, when she was chasing me to apparently try to teach me some lesson about passing people (?) — she had run a red light.
Here’s why, being more than just a photograph of the (shudder) President-elect, Time’s “Person of the Year” cover makes a subtle statement about power, conspiracy, and impending crisis.
I wish I could find the video I saw recently where Penn Jillette said something like this: “There are about seven billion people on the Earth… and about seven billion of them are good. They’re good people.”
I believe that too.
We shouldn’t believe the perpetual “news” story, courtesy of social media and whatever’s left of the mainstream press, that everyone is out for himself. It just isn’t true.
In that light, I share this story, which I just grabbed off a friend’s LinkedIn newsfeed, of a man who spends more than half his income saving people from jumping off a bridge, with 321 saves and counting.
For eight years, since the moment President Barack Obama took office, the Republican party has just said no.
No to a health care plan based on one of their own.
No to a stimulus plan even though the economy was on the precipice of disaster.
No to education reforms that they had previously championed.
No to raising the debt ceiling, which led to a national credit downgrade, which roiled the markets and threw the economy back into jitters.
No to giving a hearing, just a hearing, to the President’s Supreme Court nominee — one they had previously liked — under the ridiculous pretense that it needed to wait until after the presidential election despite all history to the contrary, as well as something called the United States Constitution, which they had sworn to uphold.
No even to basic respect, as they challenged the President’s birthplace, refused even to be photographed him, told bald-faced lies about him, insinuated or directly stated that he’s a Muslim (which he is not — but which, it should be said, is not against the law), and even went so far as to interrupt the State of the Union with the hurled imprecation, “You lie!”
And the price they have paid for all this is… nothing.
As Politico relates in painful detail, they have been rewarded with the full monty: the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and, soon, the Supreme Court.
Their intransigence isn’t even ideological. Many of the things they’ve objected to were proposals that they originated. No, it was 100% pure party politics. Their goal was to put their party before the country.
But saying no is easy when it isn’t your hand on every lever. Now they’re going to want to do things.
I wonder if the Democrats will say no.
I got an invite to an event that’s on “Noveymber 29” — so that’s like a holiday event with the oy vey already built in.
A dear friend of mine had surgery not that long ago that still leaves her tired. When I picked her up today to go see the matinee of a new play, she said she wasn’t sure she’d be up for an early dinner afterward because she hadn’t been able to take a nap. We agreed to play it by ear.
The play was terrible.
As is usually the case with this sort of thing, you can tell within the first few minutes just how bad it’s going to be, if not sooner (like, before it even begins). In this particular case, the acting in the first scene was what I’m going to call “neurotic New Yorker” over-the-top, with all of the intended comedy falling with a thud all over the audience. Every scene afterward seemed like it was from an entirely new and different play: a human crawls onto the stage play-acting as a kitty cat (complete with lines); cheerleaders for some reason show up and dance around; there’s a searing melodrama between a strident young woman and her overbearing and two-dimensional Trumpist father; and a young actress takes on the additional role of “Grandma” in a performance ripped straight from “The Carol Burnett Show,” minus any shred of comic ability.
At intermission, my friend turned to me and said the magic words, “Do you want to just leave?”
She was checking first to see if I thought it was as horrible as she did. Maybe she was just being courteous, but the idea that she wondered if I might be enjoying this play cast a certain pall over my conception of our friendship. Surely she knew me better than this: Of course I wanted to leave.
For lots of reasons, I’m not somebody who’s generally eager to leave during intermission. Yes, it seems rude to the actors. Also, sometimes there’s something that bears watching — a performer, an unanswered question, a clever bit of writing that lends hope to the future. (But not in this case.) And, finally, my not wanting to be a hypocrite; I say this as someone who at one point produced just enough bad theatre that he’s aware that nobody sets out to do crummy work.
But the perk of leaving at intermission was obvious: Now we had time for an even earlier dinner. So we went out for sushi and talked about all sorts of things, and at one point remarked that we’d been friends for more than twenty years now. She brought up her retirement planning; I floated the idea of cashing out all sorts of things in a far-flung future. When you put those sorts of things into perspective, as we did, along with her life-saving surgery and my frequently thinking back to my friend who died last year — then it becomes awfully easy to leave during an intermission so you can make better use of the time you have.
I’m someone who wakes up every morning thankful. Grateful. Really.
I guess I read enough and watch enough and see enough and can mentally extrapolate from irksome circumstance through to terrifying situations well enough that when I wake up and none of the horrors of the world applies to me at that moment, I’m just grateful for that. And to know that to feel otherwise than lucky, to have food and shelter and family and friends, to read “The Road” and know that phew none of that post-nuclear desperation has happened around here yet, to read about the people who are grateful for the opportunity to live in the bottom of the dump in Nigeria because the pickings are better there, for me to focus instead on the minor nits and picks of the day or the irritations of, say, traffic, would be… churlish. Disrespectful to comity and some greater force. Ungrateful.
Yesterday, my elder son and I spoke on the phone, and then we exchanged texts. We had a brief conversation about acknowledgement and gratitude. In his brief digital list of things he’s grateful for, he included “heat.” He lives in Chicago now, and if you’re from southern California and haven’t experienced Chicago in November, I don’t recommend it. He said he feels especially sorry right now for the homeless people there. I liked that sentiment so much that I texted him some money he didn’t ask for, and said I hoped he’d spend it on a nice Thanksgiving dinner, and something fun, and I figured he’d have a little extra to drop on some of the homeless people.
As for me, I slept this morning until I woke, awakening in what Wallace Shawn calls “the mansion of books and art” that some of us are incredibly fortunate to live in. I exchanged Thanksgiving greetings with some friends on Facebook, and a text with the dear friend who had emergency surgery two days ago, came downstairs, fixed some breakfast, read the newspaper, and looked forward to whole roomfuls of furniture that we bought last night and that will arrive in two weeks. The bed alone cost us seven thousand dollars. We’re not wealthy, but we work hard for our money, and we wanted that adjustable bed with the you’re-sinking-into-it mattress and the massager, plus the dresser, plus the nightstands, plus the lamps, plus the entertainment stand, plus the bed frame and headboard, plus for downstairs the sofa and the loveseat and the recliner and the two end tables plus the center table plus the rug plus the five decorative items and the “free” blanket. So they’re all arriving on December 8th, a date we chose because we’d finally have time to remove all the old furniture and paint and be otherwise ready. The new furniture will make it even more comfortable for us here, and for our guests, and will help to keep people working at the furniture store and at the manufacturing plants and the newspaper where the furniture company advertises and elsewhere, and resulted in a very nice Thanksgiving-eve commission for our 24-year-old salesman, a nice helpful guy named Narek who emigrated from Tehran with his family. I’m now grateful to Narek and to a system that let him and his family come in and that lets us exchange goods and services around the globe.
I would be thankful if that continues.
Everything’s still here — but it’s been moved around, like a burglar came in while we were out at the movies. It makes for an uncomfortable scene in your own home.
Stephen Colbert had a similar sort of night, it turns out, but his was televised.