The above is taken from an email sent to me by Marvel Comics soliciting my interesting in buying an immediate download of #3 of their limited series “Original Sin.”

Let me just say that Marvel isn’t kidding when they promise, above, “ANSWERS AT ALL COSTS!”

I flew out of Los Angeles this morning for five days of business and pleasure in Nashville, Tennessee. Tucked under my arm as I walked through LAX was a paperback copy of a book I’d always mean to read, “The Bell Jar,” by Sylvia Plath.

While I was checking my bag outside, the next lady in line leaned forward and said, “Oh, what are you reading? ‘The Bell Jar.’ Hm.”

Inside, while she was ensuring I wasn’t a terrorist hiding explosives in my iPad, the blonde TSA Agent scanning my boarding pass and license said, ” ‘The Bell Jar.’ How is that?”

A few minutes later, the pleasant and attractive sandwich girl selling me a severely overpriced comestible for my longish flight said, “Now what is that you’re reading? ‘The Bell Jar’? Is that any good? Should I read that?”

I couldn’t figure out any of this special treatment. Yeah, I’ve got a book — so what? Had they all heard of “The Bell Jar” and this was their chance to ask about its merits? Then I started looking around — all up and down LAX and, later, all up and down the aisle of my particular flight, and noticed that I was the only person with a book. No one else I could see anywhere had so much as a magazine, or even a newspaper — they all had smartphones or tablets — but I had an actual book.

I started to feel like the last carrier pigeon, with everyone else watching me take flight.

On the plane, a moon-faced lady with a black mop of hair in a Little Lotta style and upper arms like dappled ham hocks and sporting an Angry Birds wristwatch with a thick black rubberized band, wedged herself into the seat between me and the old lady in the aisle seat. The moment we ascended into the clouds, she dredged her smartphone from a crevasse somewhere on her person and took a photo across the frontage of my face and out the window. There was nothing out there but clouds, but she captured them.

About 10 minutes later, she took another one.

Throughout the flight, as she munched down a six-ounce can of roast almonds, a bag of PopCorners (“The new shape of popcorn!”), a perfunctory apple, and absolutely everything proffered by the flight attendant, including pretzels, cookies, and nut-substitutes, and, yes, topping it all off with the requisite Diet Coke, she continued to snap photos through the window.

I imagined the slide slow for relatives later:

“At 9:50, I flew through this cloud. … See this cloud? We flew through this one at 10:05. … This cloud here, this is really great — 10:17…..”

When she wasn’t doing this, she had her Kindle reader fired up. So that she could play Angry Birds.

What was it again that drove Sylvia Plath to suicide before “The Bell Jar” could even be published? Had she lived, this bookless experience would have killed her.

Tomorrow night, I’m reading an original piece that I just finished writing 5 minutes ago, “Letting Go of the Dead” as part of the Shine storytelling series. The event runs from 7:30 to 9:30 at the YWCA at the YWCA Santa Monica/Westside, 2019 14th Street, Santa Monica CA 90405 . Come join us! Here’s where you can find out more info.

Years ago, I did a lot of readings such as this. More recently, I haven’t had the time. But the beauty of agreeing to do one is that inevitably you wind up writing something new. (At least, I do.) Tonight I gave the opening remarks at a civic event here in my adopted hometown of Burbank — which occasioned my writing a couple of pages today about leadership, pages that I wouldn’t have written otherwise. And, now, I’ve got 1350 words on the subject of death and letting go, told in what I hope is a trenchant but lightly comic style. So as to keep it  a “bright story of positive change.”

When I was 15 and unexpectedly editing a rock and roll newspaper that was distributed free around Atlantic County, New Jersey, free records were shipped to my home by record companies with delightful regularity.

One day I opened a thin square box and pulled out an album with the odd title Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! . I slapped that record onto my stereo, was jolted and thrilled by a sound I’d heard nowhere else, and played that record over and over almost until the groove on each side wore flat. To this day, the Devo version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is the right one, and those Rolling fellows are pretenders.

So imagine my thrill that someone is, finally, making what I hope will be a definitive documentary about Devo. Here’s a five-minute preview, covering the origin of the band as a reaction and response to lackadaisical hippies. (Which just makes me love them all the more.)

What does Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road sound like when “transcribed” by a computer into piano music? Like this:

Sounds about right.

A week ago, my company moved to a new location, about a mile and a half from the old location, but far removed from the enormous infrastructural upset about to be occasioned by a massive freeway project. To give you an example of the impacts of said project:  In March, the state agency put up signs announcing that starting in May, San Fernando Boulevard would be permanently closed. What was our address? 2319 N. San Fernando Boulevard.

Given that we were moving, I decided to make some improvements in my own office, things that would help me keep my desk from looking like a landing strip for paper debris, and that would help me streamline my day so that I can do more writing. (That is, when I’m not on the phone. A few years ago when someone asked my wife what I do for a living, she said, “He talks to people all day and they give him money.”) If you’re going to move, you might as well move everything into a better position at the same time. So:  we’ve moved the file drawers of my plays and essays and short stories and correspondence and other miscellany that isn’t readily needed into an alcove outside my office, and we’ve freed up more room within arm’s reach for things I use regularly. The interior designers have come in several times and made small adjustments and it’s gotten better and better. As of today, I can shred documents, print papers, use my laptop, and otherwise lay hands on all the necessary equipment of my daily endeavors with a mere swivel of my seat. The ergonomic accomplishment of this reassures me that, yes, we will be able to put people on Pluto quite comfortably and soon.

But here’s what hasn’t kept up:  my brain. So far, my muscle memory is outlifting all of that spatial engineering.

Every time I go to get my car keys, I reflexively reach over to the left — where they are no longer kept. The printer is no longer behind me, but that’s where I’m always reaching. The used paper I flip over and feed into said printer, to save both money and the environment? No, it isn’t in a drawer beneath the printer now, it’s in a drawer to the left of that. And on and on. I almost feel like I’m performing that exercise Andre Gregory recommends in My Dinner With Andre, where you use your non-dominant hand all day and thus reawaken yourself to experience — but go psychotic at the same time, because everything is complicated by sudden awareness.

What I’ve become newly aware of is just how strong muscle memory is — how quickly the brain develops shortcuts that speed up our processes but diminish our sensitivity to experience, and how loath it is to give them up. Sure, I could put everything back where it used to be, but where’s the progress in that?  As a thinking person, as someone who believes in mind over muscle, I refuse to give in. Which just leaves me wondering:  Although we know it becomes harder to remember things as we age, just how long does it take for your muscles to forget?

I was sorry to learn tonight of the death of comics artist Dick Ayers at age 90. Ayers drew or inked a lot of notable comics, including Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos and Fantastic Four, and he may have been the last surviving Marvel artist of the early 1960’s*. The comic I most associate him with is the original Ghost Rider, a Western hero who predated the motorcycle-riding Ghost Rider (and who was later renamed Night Rider to eliminate that confusion).

But that’s not the primary way I remember Dick Ayers. Dick Ayers was also the first, or one of the first, pro interviews I got for the comics fanzines I published in my teens in the 1970’s. He lived in upstate New York, where a young artist named Rich Mayone who drew comic strips for my fanzine heard about him and was able to get an interview. Here’s how Rich pitched the interview to me (and I’m paraphrasing): “There’s a guy around here, an inker, who did a lot of Marvel comics. Mostly Westerns, but still, it was Marvel.” As is typical with 14-year-olds, neither of us had any awareness of, and probably not much interest in, what this artist had been doing even five years earlier.

*update, two-and-a-half hours later:  (Other than a guy named Steve Ditko!)

From Disney and Pixar, no less!

This morning I was awakened at the bloodcurdling time of 7:30 a.m. by a frantic call from my 15-year-old daughter. She had forgotten her homework on her desk at home, it was due today, and it was worth “FIFTY POINTS!” I didn’t know the relative value of that — 50 points out of 100? Out of one million? And points toward what? — and, in fact, I knew relatively little about anything at that hour, including who this was who was calling me so urgently (I announced myself as “Lee,” when my actual name in this circumstance should have been “Dad.”). All I could make out in my head-swimming confusion was that this sounded serious, so I agreed to get those papers and run them over to her high school.

By the time I was there, I was fully awake, or at least more fully awake, or perhaps more honestly less completely non-awake, so I stopped at the local Fresh & Easy to pick up something to eat for breakfast. I was checking out various types of yogurt and of fruit when a dark-haired guy in a tank top whirled around and said to me, “Heeyyyy!!!”

I looked at him blankly and said back, with less enthusiasm, “Hey.”

“How are you?” he said. “You must live around here.”

“Not really. I’m just here because I had to run my daughter’s homework to her high school.” Even while saying this, I wondered why I was sharing this information so freely. Important rule: When in doubt, do not share information freely. Yes, I have watched too many spy dramas.

I eyed him further. He looked familiar — but frankly, who doesn’t? Everybody looks a little like someone else, unless you’re dealing with an outlier like Richard the Third or Peter Dinklage. Was he a former student from USC? Could have been. Support staff for a client? Long-ago member of my writing workshop? A guy from the gym where I work out? Looked like he could be one of those guys from the gym — but it was hard to tell because he wasn’t naked and sweating. (Thankfully.) “I can’t place you,” I finally said. This was a line I had heard on “Mad Men” the other night and liked.

“Jim,” he said.

“Oh. Jim,” I repeated. I still had no idea who he was. “Good seeing you.”

I went back to my shopping. A few minutes later, as he left, he said, “See you later.”

“Okay!” I called back, still puzzling over this. Then I wondered, was he saying his name is “Jim,” or was he saying that he knew me from the gym? Maybe this line from “Mad Men” wasn’t as useful as I thought it would be when I’d heard it — maybe it wasn’t specific enough.

Or, maybe, this guy didn’t know me at all, and was pranking me in a way my girlfriend and I used to do eons ago on the boardwalk of Wildwood, NJ when we would accost unsuspecting middle-aged women and address them as “Mrs. McGillicuddy.”

Unless I see this guy again — at the gym, perhaps — I won’t know if he’s Jim or “gym.” Or if I was a McGillicuddy.