When I was in New Jersey recently I had the opportunity to take three of my great-nephews to their local comic-book store. I took some cash out of an ATM because I wanted to buy each of them something, and figured I’d spend about 10 dollars each.

All three of them were excited to be there (as was I, of course). The middle brother (aged 11, I believe) scored eight comics he wanted out of the dollar box; he was especially glad to learn about “Damage Control,” because he’d always wondered who cleaned up the messes left by superheroic battles, and to pick up an entire run of the miniseries for cheap was glorious. The youngest, who turned nine just this week, was interested in a lot of the things in the store, but decided he didn’t actually want anything. (I know:  remarkable wisdom in one so young. One of the things I want most at this point of my life is to be rid of some of the things I own, because it’s feeling like they own me. But it’s taken me decades of adulthood to realize this.) The eldest brother selected a small Transformer in a locked display case, and then said to me something I’ve been thinking about ever since:  “We can say it’s my birthday present.”

I wouldn’t have said that, because I hadn’t known it was going to be his birthday a few days hence. And understandably so:  I see these boys once, or sometimes twice, a year. And I don’t think I’ve ever been there for the birthday of any of them. We’ve got a large extended family — my mother; my brother and his wife and their daughter and their son and their daughter-in-law; my other brother and his husband; my sister and her husband, and their daughter and her husband and their three children, and their son and his girlfriend and their son, and their daughter and her husband and their three children; plus myself and my wife and our three children. That’s 28 of us. This leaves out all the various aunts and uncles and cousins and so forth. Who could possibly remember all these birthdays? My policy is to send children random gifts when least expected, for maximum impact.

So when my great-nephew said, “We can say it’s my birthday present,” well… I hadn’t intended to get him one. But he assumed he was due one. And then I remembered what childhood was like. Childhood is that period of your life when you believe that people owe you something. I certainly felt that way at his age. When I was his age, I spent a month away from my parents staying with relatives in another state, and during that month my birthday came around. I got a card in the mail from my mother with some money in it — but I nevertheless fully expected a full-on birthday party upon my return weeks after the date. Forty years later, it takes no effort at all to conjure the shock I felt at no birthday party at all. I lurked around for two full weeks expecting at any moment for my family to jump out and yell “surprise!” and confront me with a full-tilt birthday party, with streamers and hats and balloons and a mountain of gifts — except I wouldn’t be surprised, because I knew, I just knew, all along that surely such an event would be coming any day now, there was no fooling me. Except it didn’t.

Which leads us to the pain of adulthood:  the slow dawning that no one owes you anything, that, indeed, if you are to get anything in adulthood, you need to get it on your own. Heirs and princesses and landed lords and movie stars and billionaires born with the name Trump don’t need to learn this lesson, but just about everyone else does.

When we got back to my mother’s house from our comic-book-store spree, I saw that the Chinese food my brother had ordered for dinner with our mother had arrived. As I sat down to eat, I fished out a twenty-dollar bill to give to him. “No, that’s okay. It wasn’t much,” he said. “Besides, you bought at the comic-book store.” Spoken like a true adult.

I have a number of friends who have been influential and highly placed Republicans. (I say “have been” because most of them have left the party. Or, perhaps more appropriately, the party has left them.) They’ve run campaigns, or served in significant roles in various statehouse or federal administrations. Two years ago, I was having lunch with one of them when I heard myself saying, “I kind of like John Boehner. I don’t agree with him, but I think he’s an American patriot. And I feel sorry for him.”

Yesterday, when I saw that he resigned,  while my Democrat friends were cheering, my heart sank. As I posted on one liberal friend’s Facebook page, “We’ll see how much you like what comes next.”

Vitriol isn’t new to American politics, and isn’t new to politics anywhere. (As the histories of ancient Greece and Rome attest.) But I wish we had less of it, and more focus on areas where viewpoints converge to fix actual problems. One of my former-Republican friends advises people to find the area of agreement and work on that. To do that, people have to stay civil. We could use more of that.

I’ve done my fair share of mocking political leaders I don’t agree with; lately, unless they’re truly vile or evil (same word, spelled differently), I resist. I woke up this morning again to find hundreds of my Facebook friends going on about John Boehner’s “orange skin” and his propensity for tears, and giving ha-ha-ha’s at him. Here’s what I feel I know about John Boehner:  because he came from humble origins, he was indeed frequently moved by finding himself second in line to the presidency; because he actually cared not only about the aims of his party but the needs of the country, he tried to wrangle a recurring heretic mob into agreement. Was he a successful Speaker? No. Will we like what comes next? No. Part of me believes that Boehner is doing this now so that he can go out on his own terms — refusing to shut down the government again, because now he’s free to work a deal with whomever he likes.

One of Boehner’s stated goals was to be an historic Speaker. I can’t find a previous example of a Speaker stepping down in precisely this fashion. So now he’s made history. It’s not the history he wanted, and not the one we should have wanted either.

Got a spare room?

I’ve got a middle-aged playwright friend who needs an inexpensive, temporary, new living situation somewhere in Los Angeles effective next Wednesday.

He’s a non-smoker, knows his way around a kitchen, seems to me like the tidy sort, and, as he says, is “too old to party to excess or many any noise other than typing on my laptop.”

The other night, I caught an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s latest show. In this one, he was partaking of the foods of his native New Jersey, dining at some spots I recognize, including Dock’s Oyster House and the Knife & Fork Inn, both of which are in poor, bedraggled Atlantic City.

During the course of the show, and at various restaurants, Bourdain eats:

• a cheesesteak
• pizza
• two hot dogs, with french fries
• clam chowder
• deep-fried fish, with more french fries
• oysters
• a lobster stuffed with crabmeat
• an Italian sub loaded with meats and cheese, heavy on the oil
• spaghetti with meatballs

The closest thing to a vegetable in there was the spaghetti sauce.

Last Monday night, I got back from a brief trip to New Jersey to help celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday. Over the course of four-and-a-half days there, I gained three pounds. This was while going to the gym on two of those days.

So maybe Chris Christie isn’t a glutton. Maybe he just eats in New Jersey.

One day after what would have been his 98th birthday, I went to the official opening of “Comic Book Apocalypse:  The Graphic World of Jack Kirby,” an exhibit in the CSUN Art Galleries at Cal State Northridge, here in the San Fernando Valley. The show runs through October 10, and if you have any interest in comic-book art — and even if you don’t — I recommend you go.

I say that because you’ll gain a new and greater understanding of an artist whose impact can’t be — shouldn’t be — underestimated. Kirby wasn’t just a great comics artist, wasn’t just a great innovator, he was a brilliant mind who was able to create new myths for our time. Moreso than even Philip K. Dick and H.P. Lovecraft, artists similarly stuck in a creative ghetto whose ideas seeped deep into our collective subconscious, Kirby created whole universes that are now accepted as givens.

While the exhibit covers the length of Kirby’s 50-year career, starting in the 1940s, it dwells on four particular series:  “Fantastic Four,” “Thor,” the New Gods titles (“New Gods,” “Forever People,” “Mister Miracle” and Kirby’s run on “Jimmy Olsen”) and “Kamandi.”

To me, “Fantastic Four” remains the high-water mark; the example of a space-traveling team of science explorers who meet new cultures far and wide while striving to represent us in a noble fashion left an indelible mark upon me. The series also introduced: Black Panther and Wakanda, the Inhumans, the Silver Surfer, Galactus, Ronan the Accuser, the Silver Surfer, the Skrulls, Doctor Doom, and many more. All of these have already been in major motion pictures, or soon will be. All of them were primarily created by Jack Kirby.

(Kirby also co-created almost every important Marvel character from 1958 to 1970, and many, many important DC characters in the five years he was there as well.)

I was thrilled to see so much original artwork, some in pencil but most of it inked by an array of Kirby’s primary inkers (the delightful Joe Sinnott on “Fantastic Four,” Mike Royer on the New Gods titles and “Kamandi,” and the regrettable Vinnie Colletta on “Thor.” Seeing Kirby’s originals inked under different hands gave me the opportunity to discuss the different styles with my daughter Emma and friend Ross, who went with me. The exhibit includes several examples of Colletta having erased some of Kirby’s detail work underneath, so that he could finish the job more quickly.

I also learned some things. “Thor,” which began more as a modern-day Norse fable, transmuted into a trippy science fiction epic that featured the title character meeting embodiments of fate and the universe out in outer space. Few among us would take ancient Norse gods and put them in outer space, but that’s what a mind that worked by leaps and bounds did. What I learned seems obvious in retrospect:  that Kirby’s Fourth World saga was essentially a sequel to “Thor,” in which these gods were dead or dying, and new gods created, against the backdrop of technological advancement. (Kirby may have predicted the iPhone in creating the Mother Box, which is handheld and connects to all knowledge. Judging from the actions of my youngest, it’s impossible to wean someone off it.)

I tried to share with Emma what it felt like, at age 10 or so, to get treasured old “Fantastic Four” comics in the mail from mail-order king Robert Bell in Happauge, NY, comics that I had scrimped and saved and sent away for, how incredibly exciting it was to see a padded envelope waiting for me in the mailbox and knowing what was inside. This was before the internet, of course, before everything was available instantly, before instant gratification. Prying the staples off the outside of a padded mailer and opening its flap was like unsealing Tutankhamun’s tomb (with a similar scent of moldering discovery leaking out).

The dynamism of Kirby’s artwork never fails to impress. But it’s his vision, his wild inventiveness, his restless intellect, his brilliance in predicting and creating all these things that fascinate us (and drive the economy), that’s truly striking. That vision is so large it’s barely containable within the walls of the gallery.

Dr. Wayne Dyer has died.

My questions about him haven’t changed.

I took this yesterday. It’s catty-corner across the corner from Moving Arts, where we’ve been provoking arguments since 1992.

Why do I love the music I love?

Tonight at 7 p.m. in Santa Monica, I’ll be one of the five storytellers addressing this question. (Most specifically in my case the music of Pere Ubu.) It’s my second appearance in a program of live storytelling called Shine. Here are the details, if you’d like to come join us.

The other night, my wife said, “Why are you doing this?” (Somehow neglecting the fact that I’ve been doing readings, speeches, talks, and what have you pretty much my entire life.)  Before I could respond, one of my kids said, “So he can get people to listen to Pere Ubu for 10 minutes.”

Precisely right. It’s missionary work.

For a few years now, since seeing the eatery profiled on television by Anthony Bourdain, I’ve been trying to eat at Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco. I love seafood, and I respect Mr. Bourdain’s opinion and revere his smart and smart-alecky New Jersey attitude about food and its particulars while enjoying the company of newfound friends. Any attachment I can make to the Bourdain lifestyle, I take.

It shouldn’t be difficult to get into a public restaurant, but Swan has proved challenging. Their hours are limited, lines are long, they don’t take reservations, and although I’m in San Francisco two or three times a year, I’m not always in that end of town. Plus, the place seats only about 10 people.

But I have made efforts.

The first time I went to Swan, they were closed unexpectedly for maintenance. This was probably two years ago.

The next time I went to Swan, driving in from Burlingame (home to SF airport), they were closed. It was a Sunday and I hadn’t realized they are closed on Sunday.

The third time I went to Swan, the line was too long and I could see I’d never get in.

The fourth time I went to Swan, I actually got in line and was going to get in! A shiver ran through my being. Unfortunately, I had to use the restroom. I asked someone to hold my place and said I’d be right back, and dashed across the street to the Chase bank that I knew to have a public restroom in the lobby. When I returned, I discovered that someone had taken my place and that Swan had closed the line right behind that place. In other words, I would have gotten in. But now the line was definitively closed. I did speak with one of the proprietors about my predicament, and while he sounded sympathetic, he also sounded as though he’d heard variations of this excuse many times and wasn’t falling for it. I decided not to get irritated about this, because I wanted to preserve the charm of eating at Swan some day, and because having the grail has little value if you haven’t endured a grail quest in order to get it. So I went off and had middling pizza instead.

Then, yesterday, I found myself in San Francisco again, on business to see a client’s show and with a friend and colleague in tow, and said to him, “Hey… have you ever eaten at Swan Oyster Depot? Do you like oysters?” He hadn’t, and he does, so off we went, walking just over a mile of San Francisco’s extreme peaks and valleys, until arriving at the nondescript but legendary little diner that serves oysters and not much else. We got in line, and a mere 20 minutes later, we were encamped inside on shaky barstools that surely date back to the joint’s opening in 1912. I ordered a beer, clam chowder, a combination salad (lobster, crab, and I don’t know what, atop shredded lettuce), and of course a plate of mixed oysters drawn from both our majestic shores, topped off with San Franciscan sourdough bread and pats of butter straight from the frozen north. All was deeply good.

Later, checking out the LA Times online, I was astonished to note that that very day, the Times ran a story calling Swan Oyster Bar “The Best Place to Eat in America.” Not the best oyster place; not the best place in San Francisco; not the best place that week; just The Best Place to Eat in America. Now, while I certainly enjoyed Swan Oyster Bar, and the complete satisfaction that came from finally getting in and ordering any damn thing I wanted, and paying $145 for the pleasure of lunch for two, this was not the most spectacular meal I’d ever enjoyed. I recall fondly one evening in the Aria in Las Vegas where the waiter brought out sample round after sample round when he decided he’d just taken a shine to my business partner and me. (Mostly to her.) I also recall a splendid experience with my wife at a major seafood house in San Francisco where the $300 we plunked down for dinner was richly rewarded with serving after serving of truly divine finny treasures and drinks. But the offerings at Swan, much as I enjoyed them, reminded me of a line from one of my own plays:  “It’s like first sex. You finally got what you wanted, but now you’re a little disappointed.”

Plus, to be picky, the Best Place to Eat in America is not Swan Oyster Depot, or any other place that posts dollar signs next to food names. The Best Place to Eat in America is my mother’s house. As anyone who’s eaten there can attest.

I’m not sure I feel like seeing that new “Fantastic Four” movie everyone is panning.

What I’d really like to see is the unaired “Fantastic Four” TV series from 1963.