It Came Upon a Midnight Everclear

Three words: “Dean,” “Martin” and “cats.”

As I begin this first post since all the chickens have come home to roost—except that’s a lousy analogy, because Donald Trump has, in the past five or so weeks, appointed so many bloodthirsty foxes to guard the social network and environmental henhouses that the fowl already are as good as dead—I’m thinking of recent exchanges with a couple of friends of mine.

In an email shortly after my “Night of the Living Dread” post, a similarly distraught Betsy told me she was getting an early start on immersing herself in Christmas music to try to at least somewhat anesthetize herself against the immediate horror of the words “President-elect Trump” and the inevitable nightmare of the next four (at least) years. I endorsed her move in the way that I support anyone stepping away from the ledge and choosing hope over the alternative. But I doubted seriously that I could follow suit, even though I love Christmas music and typically make WASH-FM—DC’s “Christmas music station” from Thanksgiving through December 25—one of my seasonal defaults.

The reason I so strongly doubted it was concisely stated by Alison, aka “NY Friend,” who responded to my November 9 post exactly a month afterward and—enumerating such causes for despair as Trump’s conflicts of interest, cabinet picks, continued fact-denying and childish gloating, and suggested contributions to planetary collapse (such as reneging on American participation in the Paris agreement on battling climate change)—declared “It’s worse than I thought” and ended her postmortem with this: “Disaster. No one with a spine to stand up to him. We are so screwed.”

I agree with every word she wrote. Everything Trump has done, said and tweeted in the weeks since his election has further degraded the office of the president, called into deeper question the survival of democracy in this country, and boggled the mind at the inevitability of things getting that much worse once the man actually places his hand on the Bible (cheered on by the likes of Jerry Falwell Jr, whose soul now is in Lucifer’s proud possession) and takes hold of the nuclear codes.

And yet, I’m no longer so profoundly depressed that my stomach constantly is playing a cacophonous Charles Ives symphony and it’s hard just to face the day, as was the case in those first weeks after November 8. Part of the reason is that, a few days after Thanksgiving, I decided, without much expectation of results, to at least give Christmas music—like the peace that Yule promotes—a chance. The even bigger reason for my improved mood was the entry of two new cats into Lynn’s and my life. More on them later.

I’ve written before in this space about my fondness for Christmas music, which is somewhat counterintuitive in that I’m neither at all religious nor particularly nostalgic about my youth or our family traditions surrounding the holidays. I’m not quite sure what it is. There is nostalgia in all of it, for certain: not so much for my own youth, as for a literally whitewashed past in which a homogeneous America had nothing worse to worry about than whether it could drink enough spiked egg nog to last until the sugar-hyped kids returned to school and whether it could sweet-talk that dreamy dame into staying inside and snuggling rather than venturing out into the snowy cold.

There’s also the loopy weirdness of the mishmash of songs we’ve culturally anointed to soundtrack the holiday. This is perhaps best captured in “Here Comes Santa Claus,” in which the sacred and secular mix in the line “Let’s give thanks to the Lord above ’cause Santa Clause comes tonight.” (It gets even stranger in the hands-down best rendition of the song, when that line is sung by Elvis Presley, whose own piety was counterbalanced by the secular excesses that killed him.)

What happened this Christmas season is that I fell utterly in love with a tune that previously had been only on the periphery of my holiday consciousness: Dean Martin’s 1959 iteration of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

You’ve surely heard it, just as I had before this year—whether or not you’re technically Christian, because even a cloistered Buddhist monk can’t completely escape Christmas music in December in the United States of America. But you may not have paid insufficient attention, as I hadn’t until recently, to the careless drunken joy of Martin’s iteration of this holiday classic, in which the famously oft-soused crooner shorthands the title mammal’s name  as “Rudy,” at one point describes him as “red-beaked,” and, most incoherently, lapses into pidgin German to ask, “Rudolph mit your nose so bright, won’t you guide mein sleigh tonight?”

Now, don’t get me wrong. I know alcoholism is a horrible disease, and no laughing matter. Dean Martin’s Wikipedia page notes that he died at age 78 of lung cancer caused by his heavy smoking, but I can’t imagine that cirrhosis of his beleaguered liver would’ve been too far behind. So, kids, Don’t Try This At Home, even if you grow up to be a professional singer and record a holiday album that might stand to benefit from literal holiday spirits.  But oh, man, is Martin’s “Rudolph” ever awesome!

Everything about it screams He Just Does Not Care, and He Is Making Shit Up. Is it possible he wasn’t flat-out wasted when he recorded the song? Sure. Anything’s possible. I couldn’t readily turn up any juicy recording session backstory on the Internet. Maybe Dino was just in a soberly silly mood when the “record” light went on that day. But it sure as hell seems likelier that he was spilling hard liquor and ice all over the g-d studio floor as he leered at some skirt delivering a memo to an engineer in the booth and tried—not that hard, with uneven success—to remember the actual lyrics to the ridiculous kiddies’ tune he was being paid a fistful of greenbacks to sing.

One thing I did find in my five-minute Dean Martin/”Rudolph” research was a similar appreciation written four years ago by a guy on the website of the Portland Oregonian. He called it “the Drunk Dean Martin” version of the song, with an asterisk by the word “drunk” that he explained thusly: “I assume all Dean Martin songs are Drunk Dean Martin songs. And I refuse to believe otherwise. It’s better this way.”

It is better, somehow, to believe that Martin was utterly blitzed and cozily sloppy when he extolled the virtues of a crimson-beaked airborne deer on that particular day 58 years ago. It’s good to be reminded, at a point in history when everything is serious, and seriously awful—from starvation and annihilation in Aleppo to cynical anti-democratic power grabs in North Carolina to Christmas market terrorism in Berlin—that there’s still some fun to be had out there, whether at the bottom of a bottle or the turn of a radio dial. No, such fun won’t ultimately solve anything, but it sure as hell will make the slide toward Armageddon a little less terrifying.

I haven’t even gotten to the cats yet. And I won’t go into great detail here, because although I’m crazy about our cats in particular and felines in general, I’m all too aware that cats have become the universal-to-the-point-of-lame feel-good animal of his viral-video age. In that sense, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that our two rescue cats, Moz and Ike—who we brought home with us exactly a month ago today, on November 20—make me so damn happy. But they totally do.

They’re only about a year old and are totally kitten-ish. They’re also temporary confined to our small basement level while Bean, our three-legged hound dog, shakes the last vestiges of ringworm upstairs, so the boys not only are wild, but they’re also bored. As a result, they mostly are a crazily entertaining and often destructive whirlwind—chasing toys, wrestling madly with each other, severing my razor cord and toppling my radio from its window-sill perch, D batteries splattering across the floor. The rest of the time they are comatose—sleeping intertwined, often on my or Lynn’s lap, while we read on the sofa and marvel at how anything that devilish can look so deceptively angelic in repose.

To say that we are smitten is putting it mildly. To say that we are concurrently excited and really nervous to envision their extended reign of terror upstairs next month is 100% accurate. To say that it helps us more than we possibly could have predicted to have our years to come with them to look forward to, in counter-pose to the looming Trump years, is equally, thankfully, true.

So, yes, we’re no doubt screwed as a nation. We might live through the next four or—shudder—eight years—and come out on the other side still standing, or we might not. We might all die before that from a Trump-Kim Jong-un confrontation, or we might just wish to die when our free press ceases to exist. I’m not going to sugar-coat anything.

But at the same time, many simple pleasures in my life—from my marriage, to our dog, to my friends, to summer baseball, and now, most certainly, to our cats—give me a degree of joy and comfort, and the residual strength I'll need to fight the prevailing evils when, and as best, I can.

It’s worth noting, too, that alcohol remains an option. Ideally in moderation, but every once in a while, perhaps, in excess. Here’s looking at you, Dino the Red-Beaked Crooner.

Night of the Living Dread

It’s a little after 2 am on November 9, 2016, as I begin writing this post. The outcome of the presidential election had become clear by the time I went to bed about three hours ago, my stomach in knots and my brain in shock, but the rest of me utterly exhausted.

Lynn, meanwhile, had—wisely, it now seems to me—turned in perhaps an hour earlier, when things merely looked bad but could conceivably, just maybe, still work out.

“Wouldn’t you rather go to bed without knowing for sure,” she asked, “and be able to sleep, and find out in the morning what happened?” I felt frightened and disconsolate, and anything but sleepy at that moment. I beseeched her for reassurance, as if I was a little boy and she was Mother Courage. Where, in reality, I’m four years from eligibility for most senior discounts, and Lynn is my pragmatist spouse of the same generation.

She assured me, at around 10:15 pm, that, even if Trump should win, we—meaning she and I personally, and all Americans who believe in decency, facts, science, truth, democratic institutions, and the rule of law—would Get Through This. “This” being at least four years of being led by an ignorant, infantile, bullying narcissist. We would have no alternative but to do so, Lynn  reasoned. She reassuringly added, though, that Donald  Trump’s stupidity and empty promises to Make America Great Again—whatever that meant, in code or in procedural practice—inevitably would  reveal themselves, and ultimately would turn all but his most rabid supporters against him. Her message, basically, was that, yes, a Trump presidency would suck, but that this, too, would pass.

With that, Lynn went to bed. I told her that I might not even seek updates, and might rather just read magazines for a little while to see if I could get sleepy. But of course I did check in with televised results and newspaper websites. Which is how I knew soon enough that reason would in fact not prevail this day, in a country where there are several irrational grievances and at least one firearm for every single human being.

I then turned off the television and my smartphone, and I laid down on the sofa with a crossword puzzle to divert my brain and the white noise of a fan, directed away from me, to soothe my senses. Somehow, improbably, it actually worked. I started getting drowsy. (It seems that fearing the end of civilization takes a physical toll.) So, around 11:15 I crawled into bed beside my sleeping spouse, took a lot of deep breaths to calm myself, and somehow fell asleep.

For less than an hour, that is. By that time, a phenomenon that had begun many hours before—when it first was becoming apparent that the forecast Clinton victory was at very least in serious doubt—had jolted me awake. That phenomenon was a near-constant need to pee—as if I’d gone in the span of one evening from the typical middle-aged man who must relieve himself periodically during the night to a Depends-wearing geezer whose drain train pulls into the station every few minutes.

Did I mention, by the way, that, as those early election returns and first state-by-state forecasts were coming in, I was catching up on Sunday night’s episode of The Walking Dead on our PC while Lynn was watching an old episode of The Good Wife on our iPad? I could see her through the glass door, sitting on the couch in our sunroom, blissfully ignorant of the latest manifestations of both the zombie apocalypse on the PC screen and the electoral Armageddon on the kitchen TV. I was running to consult that TV during Walking Dead broadcaster AMC’s frequent commercial breaks, while also stopping by the bathroom to let loose great streams of urine—a river out of all proportion to the amount of liquid I’d downed in the previous many hours. By the end of that Walking Dead episode, Daryl, the show’s crossbow-firing macho hero, looked to have been all but broken by the evil sadist Negan and his murderous band of sycophants. My spirit felt equally broken by the electoral trends. And my urinary tract was suggesting that I’d suddenly become a man of 80.

So it was that my brief sleep ended a little after midnight, never to reengage. That first post-bedtime trip to the loo woke me sufficiently that the electoral events of the evening, and all of their chilling implications, came flooding back over me. Try as I might to resume the deep breathing and calm my increasingly feverish brain, it was all over. My stomach again was in turmoil, only now it was doing somersaults. I was up roughly every 15 minutes to piss. (In fact, I have to do so now. It’s as if my body wants to purge itself of his horrific election-night folly, but simply can’t get to the bottom of it. There’s no relief because there’s Always More in there—just as there first will be President-elect Trump, then a President Trump, then, perhaps, a Generalissimo or Fuehrer Trump.)

When it became crystal-clear to me that there’d be no more sleep for me, I knew what I had to do. The title of this post may not be terribly clever—it’s bound to be echoed in duplicate or in spirit by scores of other shell-shocked headline writers on news sites and blogs—it accurately reflects my feelings, and it dovetails nicely with the whole Walking Dead thing. It formed in my mind before I ever rose out of bed and headed to the PC to write this post.

I know that this is far from the best-crafted or most thoughtful narrative I’ve ever written for this space. And it sure as hell isn’t the funniest, as my sense of humor seems to have escaped me. Nevertheless, I’ll cursorily proofread it—resisting the urge to sand its edges and try to make myself sound smarter—and post it before daylight. It seems important to me to do this.

Several hour ago, before the Trump win was certain, I heard on the radio that President Obama had said, somewhere, something yesterday along these lines: The important thing to remember, whatever should happen, is the beauty of democracy. Keep perspective. Whoever wins, the sun will come up in the morning and we’ll all still be Americans.

Notwithstanding the fact that it may well have been easier for our incumbent chief executive to say such a thing before it was revealed that he will be succeeded by a doofus madman, I do think that President Obama’s sentiment was sincere, and that he truly believes what he said. (Although I imagine he also now believes that morning sun would feel a lot warmer had his political party run Anybody Else against the admitted pussy-grabber.) Still, it’s really, really hard for me to share Obama’s steadfast belief in the leavening powers of democracy.

Why? Because the facts as I see them are that the fate of our nation, and to an extent of the world, will be in the hands, come January, of an ego-driven borderline (?) sociopath who David Letterman rightly described recently as “damaged.” Because Lynn and I, and millions and millions of Americans who think like we do, will be beholden to Trump's immature whims and grudges, while he’s abetted by a compliant Republican Congress and an echo chamber of zealots and right-wingers who’ve somehow become so bereft of both hope and reason that they literally would—and did—elect anybody who wasn’t the inexplicably demonized and hated Hillary Clinton.

It really feels to me as if democracy both triumphed (the system doesn’t look so rigged now, does it?) and died tonight/this morning. While I imagine the sun indeed will come up in a few hours, maybe it shouldn't.

It feels right to me to post these thoughts while it’s still dark outside, and after I’ve scanned through my 100-plus earlier blog posts to see that everything in them seems trivial compared with what’s just happened.

I would love to look back at this post someday—ideally sooner rather than later—and regard it as having been hugely hyperbolic and melodramatic. I hope it will prove to have been exactly that—as our vaunted democracy kicks in, straightjackets the power of the Idiot King, and boots him out of office— disgraced as he should be—in  2020.

But it’s hard—near impossible, in fact—for me to take the philosophical long view at this moment. When it's still pitch-black outside.

[Postscript: It's now a little after 8 am and it's overcast and raining. There is no sign of the sun.]       

And So We Carrie On

It was interesting timing to me that the theme of my office’s Halloween party this week was the high school prom. I remembered having read somewhere that this year marks some significant anniversary of the first film version of Stephen King’s horror novel Carrie. That’s the story, you might recall, of a naive teenager with telekinetic powers who’s cruelly humiliated at her prom and reacts by blowing not only her own fuse, but also those at the high school gym, on her way to burning the place down and killing as many of her classmates as possible. 

The timing is noteworthy to me because, as it happens, the film was released 40 years ago, in 1976. Which is the year that I graduated from high school.

I wrote a newspaper column during prom season around a quarter-century ago, when I was a feature writer at a middling rag in Savannah, Georgia. The gist of it was that I was so uncool and socially marginal during my years at Grimsley High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, that, while I had to assume that proms were held at that time, I couldn’t swear to it, because the whole concept was so alien to me that any prom-related announcements or hoopla might just as well have been spoken or written in Arabic, Chinese or some other language that I not only couldn't parse, but that was encased in an impenetrable alphabet.

That pretty much encapsulates my high school experience. It wasn’t entirely sad—I made some very good friends who I still have today—but it was far from the halcyon experience that proms are designed to pump up and celebrate. So, I can’t say exactly why, from the moment I got my postcard invitation in the mail, I was intrigued by the prospect of attending my 40-year reunion.

As I recounted in a previous blog post, it had made a certain amount of self-serving sense for me to attend my 20th reunion, as by that time I had a good job and an attractive wife, I wasn’t fat, and I still had a lot of hair. All of which fueled a turnabout-is-fair play narrative in which I fancied I’d gaze across the room at the schlubby former elite —humbled by mundane employment, mounting bills, ungrateful kids and unforgiving mirrors—and subtlety share knowing smirks with anyone else of my teen social strata who’d attended the event for similar reasons. Never mind that, as it happened, schadenfreude played a very minor role in the good time that I had that night. (Alcohol might have.)

But what point was there, really, in attending my 40th reunion? Wasn’t I still in touch with all of my former classmates with whom I wanted to be? If I wasn’t sufficiently curious about the rest even to establish a Facebook or LinkedIn account for spying purposes, why should I pay almost a hundred dollars for Lynn and me to spend an evening awkwardly standing around in a historic theater’s former props room, scanning name tags, seeing which of them perhaps rang a bell, and waiting for long-dormant memories to emerge from the deeper recesses of my brain?

I tried not to analyze it too much, beyond the fact that it surely was, on some level, a mortality thing. I mean, I’m nearly 60 now, I did share a time and place with these people, and I likely wouldn’t ever see most of them again. Also, the logistics were easy and the circumstances convenient. Greensboro was only a six-hour drive, the recent death of our beloved old cat meant we weren’t tethered to the house by her various medical needs, and we could spend time some with my mom and dad while we in town.

(A quick aside here: I love my folks and I don’t mean this cruelly, but they, too, evoke Stephen King—in that they are The Parents Who Wouldn’t Die. They still live in the house from which I caught the school bus during the Gerald Ford administration. And yes, I do realize that making this joke at their expense means that one or both of them inevitably will expire before Christmas, damning me to everlasting guilt for having written these words.)

So, we drove down to Greensboro a few weekends ago—after I’d done a little web-searching, found some contact information, and determined that two people I wanted to see at the reunion wouldn’t be there, one would, and a fourth either was determined to avoid me or had abandoned that email address.

We arrived in town on Friday afternoon, but I purposely missed the first of the reunion weekend’s planned activities—the homecoming football game, that night, between GHS and its arch rival, Greensboro Page. I’d had no interest in high school football in the mid-1970s, or any detectable school spirit for that matter, so the match-up was no draw for me now. (I was amused the next morning to learn, however, that the Page Pirates had thoroughly annihilated the Grimsley Whirlies—which I have some dim recollection had been the typical result decades ago, too.)

I similarly skipped without regret a Class of '76 meet-up after the football game at what in those days was an Italian restaurant named Anton’s but now is a cigar bar owned by a classmate of mine who I don’t remember from Adam. (You could smoke on high school campuses back then, so he might have been the Guy With The Stogie who I'd nevertheless somehow missed.)

There was one other pre-reunion event in which I was interested, though: a late Saturday-morning tour of the school. Though I’ve been back to Greensboro a zillion times over the years—what with my parents still living there—I hadn't made a dedicated trip to the campus where I’d spent so much time over the course of three years being largely bored and sometimes miserable. (Go figure!) For whatever reason—perhaps that mortality thing again—I decided it was time to walk the halls and grounds for the first time in decades.

Somewhat to my surprise, most things didn’t look that different to me. There’s a new, modern cafeteria and a few other notable improvements, but mostly it’s the same stolid collection of brick buildings with dingy interiors. The institution dates back to the 1920s, when it was generically named Greensboro High School because it was the city’s only public one. (At least for white students, but that's another story.) A multicultural group of delightfully dorky current students—the type of earnest kids who'd gladly volunteer part of their Saturday to field questions from geezer forebears—led us at one point into the school's main auditorium. The stage still looks like it could host a vaudeville show for North Carolinians time-heisted from the Coolidge Era without any of them realizing they’d been zapped into the 21st century.

But also not surprising, sadly, was the fact that the school newspaper—for which I’d written during each of my years at GHS— no longer exists, because the very idea of reading a print compendium of days-old happenings is bizarre to today’s social media-bred youth. A teacher who was on hand for the tour told me that the wheezing publication finally gasped its final breath a few years ago, and that a brief effort to revive it online went nowhere in an age when any school news worth noting has been texted or tweeted within minutes of its occurrence.

High Life—a boilerplate name in one sense, but a tokingly appropriate sobriquet in another—was highly significant in my life, in that it set me on my career course, first in print journalism and then in writing and editing for membership organizations. The newspaper also attracted as staffers a compatible group of misfits who loved words, and relished the rare opportunity at that fraught stage of life to have some power over them. Newspaper staff gathered during the last period of the day. I have fond memories of heading home with residual feelings of camaraderie and shared effort.

At least, I noted with slight satisfaction, there’s nothing high-tech now in the large room where the newspaper offices once were. The space is a French classroom. Which seems kind of appropriate, in that the Gallic tongue lost its relevance battle with Spanish a long time ago.

After the school tour I drove back to my parents’ house, where Lynn was waiting, and we all went out to lunch. My 88-year-old dad was driving and nearly got us all killed at one point when he overshot the left turn for the restaurant and lingered seemingly forever on the wrong side of the double-yellow line as a stream of cars loomed toward us in the not-so-far distance as we all screamed, and what remains of our aging lives flashed before our collective eyes. (So, let me revise that earlier description. Let's make it The Parents Who Wouldn’t Die Unless They Could Take Their Son and Daughter-In-Law With Them.) Thankfully, however, there was no collision, and Lynn and I lived to attend the reunion.

We arrived at around 6:30 and wouldn’t end up leaving until about four improbably delightful hours later. That was about two hours after Lynn, ever the trouper and looking fantastic in a new dress—had started sitting down because her knee-high boots were killing her feet. She also reported that the Spanx that enhanced her profile were simultaneously narrowing to a trickle the blood supply to her midsection. Fortunately, however, she didn’t embarrass me by passing out. (Just kidding, sweetie. Thanks for making my classmates scratch their heads at our visual mismatch, just as they had in 1996.)

I’d spent much of my time leading up to the reunion wondering if I’d find enough people to talk to, whether the whole evening would be incredibly awkward, and if I could possibly sneak enough alcohol to maintain my spirits with the lovely but far more adult Lynn watching me like a hawk. As it turned out, however, I had just two glasses of red wine during the course of the evening and felt no need for the mellowing effects of more.

In fact, it was a great evening. Even though I found out for a fact—because the presence of the king and queen was announced—that there had indeed been a prom my senior year, apparently held in some alternate universe far from my solar system. I met up with Anita, who’d been an early fan of my newspaper writing and still was the same smart, funny person I remembered from back then. I spoke at length with Janis, who I’d liked a lot in high school but came to realize through conversation that night and a subsequent email exchange that I’d never really known. Now that I've learned at least the broad outlines of where she came from to get where she is now, I've added great admiration to that affection. I enjoyed getting reacquainted with Mark, who subversive humor came back to me the more we talked. I kidded him about his jailbait wife, who was born during the comparatively recent Nixon administration.

One guy I totally didn’t recognize tapped me on the shoulder and greeted me with great warmth. He told me his name before I even could read his name tag, and my immediate recollection of him was his sequined, bewigged and thrilling star turn as Diana Ross in a lip-synched rendition of “Stop In the Name of Love” in drama class. I mentioned it and he seemed embarrassed. He was giddily effeminate back then, but he looked and acted 100% straight now. I couldn't think of any politic way to ask, “Didn’t you used to be gay?” and it seemed presumptuous of me to exhort, “You can be yourself around me, honey!” So, I told him it was great to see him, and let it go.

At one point prizes were bestowed to alumni who could answer various school-related trivia questions. Since I’d been in most ways peripheral to school life and was involved in no activities other than the newspaper, I figured my chances of knowing any of the answers was slim to none. But one of the questions related to a striking yearbook photo in which a bunch of guys in flasher trenchcoats are standing in front of a marquee, acting as if they're about to expose their junk. I correctly identified the venue as the Star Theatre, an X-rated movie house that had been located, much to my parents’ horror, mere blocks from their Catholic church. The Star fell victim decades ago to neighborhood gentrification, but it lives on in my memory as an icon of an earlier, gentler time, when smut was the province of dank, sticky showplaces, and not something abundantly available on the nearest telephone.

My prize was covered in wrapping paper, but was exactly the size of a boxed set of videocassettes. This had me simultaneously blushing at the thought of the box containing—given the question I’d answered—director’s-cut editions of Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat, and cursing the fact that we have no device in our house on which I might watch such abhorrent cultural artifacts. As it turned out, however, I discovered, when we got back to our hotel, that the door prize actually was a pair of shot glasses bearing the name of that cigar bar. (So, still vice-related, but less interesting.)

The evening’s ambiance was frankly kind of wonderful. While the prom king and queen and I never mixed or even acknowledged each other's presence, there was no sense of social stratification in the room. We all were adults here in manners and congeniality, as well as in age. (Although not necessarily in self-perceived maturity. The gap between our external appearance and evergreen insecurities was one of the evening’s recurrent conversational themes.) Some of us have kids, others of us don’t. Some of us have stayed local, others migrated. Discussion of religion and politics was wisely left at the check-in desk. And, I have to say, most of us still look pretty damn good, considering that we came of age at a time when today’s world, for better and for worse, was essentially unimaginable.

So, yes, I did miss my high school proms. I know that for certain now. But, so what? It’s not like my high school years were a horror movie that ended in death and devastation. At worst that film was a pretty dull documentary. One that nevertheless had its moments and memorable characters, with some of whom I’m happy to now be reacquainted. High school certainly played a role in making me the person I am now, and living the life I now lead.

Attending that reunion probably did start out as a mortality thing, more than anything else. But I now see it as more of a continuum-of-life thing.

Still Waiting for My Close-up

I’m back. I’ve been back for almost a week, actually. Nothing bad happened to me out West, notwithstanding the seemingly foreboding dream referenced in my previous post. But neither did my ascent to celebrity begin in the Inland Northwest, as I fancied for an exhilarating nanosecond that it might.

My 15 minutes of fame turned out to be not even that long.

If you are a longtime reader of this blog, you … are a member of an infinitesimal subset of humanity. But also, if you are a longtime reader of this blog, you know that I have an ambition that someone recently described as a bucket-list item. I guess it is, although I’m not sure if it really qualifies as that, because I in fact have no list of achievements I’m looking to fulfill in whatever time is left to me. I mean, I have zero interest in skydiving, or hiking the length of Appalachian Trail, or sweating my way through a standup act on some comedy club’s Open Mic Night. (Were I to try any of those things, I’d probably suffer a heart attack that would hasten the aforementioned bucket’s arrival. I’d kick it during the flailing process.)

The goal to which I’m referring is running in all 50 states. If you’re not a regular reader of mine, don’t misunderstand. You’ve heard of people who’ve run marathons or even completed triathlons in every state? Who crowd-fund these efforts and raise piles of money for worthy charities by getting people to sponsor them? Who tie trips to far-flung states with community service in each locale, leaving each place a little better off from their presence? Well, what I’m talking about is pretty much the opposite of all that.

You’re familiar with the Latin phrase veni, vidi, vici? “I came, I saw, I conquered"? Well, I come, I run, I go home. That is to say, I fly somewhere, book myself into a hotel, get up early the next morning, “run” (plod along at my own pace) by myself on local streets and/or trails for at least 60 minutes, celebrate my triumph afterward with coffee and maybe a bagel, sightsee a bit, and then, within a few days, fly back. There’s a bit more to it than that—lately I’ve been flying to border cities and adding two states each trip, for instance—but that’s the gist of it. There’s absolutely no fanfare, no big to-do. I leave no social imprint. Just a carbon footprint. (Sorry about that, environment.)

The goal evolved when I was around 50 and happened one day to add up all the states in which I’d run. I’ve always felt that a run must be of a duration of at least 60 consecutive minutes to “count.” Don’t ask me why. Anyway, I discovered, to my surprise, that I already had logged somewhere around 30 states at that point. And Alaska had been achieved years earlier, when Lynn and I had taken our belated-honeymoon cruise up that state’s Inside Passage and I’d clambered off the boat at Skagway, Ketchikan and Juneau to slay the Last Frontier three times over. So, I figured that running in all 50 states was achievable. I thought, “Why not?”

Lynn graciously went along with it—figuring, I guess, that this was a harmless enough pursuit, albeit one that promised to get a bit expensive before it was completed. She indulged my driving to Kentucky to add that state, acceded to our driving to New Hampshire and Vermont while visiting her mom in Rhode Island one year, and—this was particularly awesome—signed up for a Reiki workshop on Maui in 2013 partly so that I could tick Hawaii off my list.

Last year around this time—per an earlier blog post— I flew out to Fargo, North Dakota, which abuts Minnesota, and added both of those states while visiting such local points of interest as the tiny Roger Maris Museum, which is tucked into a shopping mall. This year I staked out Spokane, Washington, near that state’s border with Idaho, and booked hotel rooms in Spokane and in Coeur d’Alene, which is about 35 miles away.

I'll throw in a little travelogue shortly. But first, let me get back to the five-or-10-minutes-of-fame thing. My first two nights in Spokane, I was staying at the Hotel Ruby, which is a refurbished motor lodge with a cocktail lounge, lots of funky murals and a decidedly hipsterish vibe. It’s the kind of place where you’re not all that surprised to find a group of Native Americans checking in when you arrive, although it turned out they actually were Native Canadians, from Toronto. There was an indigenous peoples film festival going on in town that weekend, I discovered.

This would become significant. I passed a stylish, dude ranch version of a fisherman one day while running along the Spokane River. He turned out to be an independent filmmaker from Seattle who was there to document the indigenous peoples festival. He recognized me at the hotel a couple of days later—he was staying there, too—and engaged me in conversation. He was in his 40s. He had the requisite hipster eyeglasses and over-the-top enthusiasm for anything he deemed even remotely offbeat or fresh. When he learned that I was in Spokane on a 50-states running quest, his eyes lit up and his wheels began almost visibly turning. He was stoked—clearly seeing in this dorky mono-handed guy from the East a possible ticket to documentary cachet at Sundance or South By Southwest..

My excitement grew along with his. Although my running trips are so under the radar as to be utterly undetectable, I’ll confess that I’ve always kind of wanted to be “discovered,” or at least to get a little bit of local press, or something. I’ve thought more than once, for example, of trying to interest a local journalist or TV crew in my story when I finally reach my 50th state, wherever and whenever that comes. I mean, this whole pursuit is kind of an offbeat thing to do, right? Never mind that I’d have no proof whatsoever of what I was saying, meaning that the local journalist or reporter would be taking on faith a tale that’s only dubiously compelling in the first place, then deciding to devote several column inches or minutes of air time to it.

Soon came the inevitable moment when the indie filmmaker realized my story needed an angle in order to work. “Uh-oh,” I thought. This is when he started asking me what charities my efforts were supporting, which community projects I was engaging in while in town, what hashtag I’d engaged to crowd-source my adventures, and so on. His enthusiasm plummeted as he fully realized I was nothing more than a lone guy flying to distant states to do something obscure and random for himself and nobody else. In desperation, finally, he asked, in so many words, if I hadn’t at least set this goal as a restorative quest after having lost my right hand in some horrible way—like perhaps after having triggered an IED in Iraq, or having stepped on an old landmine while serving in the Peace Corps overseas.

When I uttered the deflating words “I was born that way,” it was as if I’d told him there is no God—or, maybe, that I liked only big-budget Hollywood action movies, or vastly preferred Bud Light to craft beers. I could see in his crestfallen face that the jig was up, that he was eying the exits. When I later told Lynn about this, she said I should have invoked Seinfeld and pitched my story as a wry documentary about nothing—the idea being that my non-story, about a nonentity traveling far and wide to do something a little offbeat but ultimately prosaic was, in fact, the real story. I doubt that would’ve worked, but I wish I’d at least tried it. The best I could think to do in the moment was ask the guy his name. Maybe, I reasoned, I could win him over yet with witty email banter that might enhance my Quirky Character cred.

Even that gambit failed. Rather than tell me his name, he took my business card and promised he’d contact me. Hey, guess what? He hasn’t.

I probably could track him down through the film festival people, but what would be the point of that? That ship has sailed. Or rather, that Mini Cooper has returned to Seattle, where its owner presumably is hanging out in a cigar bar somewhere.

None of which is to say that my trip was anything other than a success. In fact, by most measures it was outstanding. I ran in delightfully crisp fall conditions along a elevated trail in Spokane that afforded fantastic views of the river below, and I jogged beside beautiful Lake Coeur d’Alene in that charming Idaho town that’s known as Resort City. I reduced to an even dozen the number of states that remain un-run. I vastly enjoyed my walks through lush Manito Park and Botanical Gardens and historic Greenwood Cemetery in Spokane, my boat tour of Lake Coeur d’Alene, and my hike up nearby Tubbs Hill. I had a great, totally unexpected conversation about our mutual vegetarianism with a young bartender on the boat.

I love seeing new places and sharing texts and photos along the way with Lynn and certain friends. Even just staying in hotels remains a kick for me after all these years. I like getting ice from the ice machine, dialing the front desk for a wake-up call, scooping up the complimentary note pad for future use at home. I’m interested in getting the lay of the land through the local TV and radio news.

Maybe I should have availed myself of legal marijuana once I realized that Washington state has it. And perhaps I should have capitalized on the relatively short distance across Idaho’s northern panhandle and tried to shoehorn in a Montana run, too. But those are minor things. It really was a great time.

Even if it didn’t bring me the acclaim that I fleetingly envisioned for myself.

Awake to the Possibilities

I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams lately.

Not dreams of world peace or of what it would be like to live in a country that laughs uproariously the very idea of a Donald Trump presidency. I’m not that big a masochist. No, I mean actual dreams. The kind your mind conjures during sleep.

I read a piece recently in the health section of the Washington Post headlined “You’re at the Final Exam and Never Attended Class. It’s that Dream Again.” The article was about the prevalence of a certain type of dream, in which you're either totally unready or frightfully ill-prepared to take a test on which much seems to be riding. The gist was that although you’d think this very common dream would be the focus of much scholarly study, apparently not so much. So, instead, the writer interviewed a few psychoanalysts and a neurologist. Who said pretty much what you’d expect: Such dreams reflect our fears of not measuring up in some way, or of not being in control of some aspect of our life.

“I think those who have it tend to be professional and were successful students,” the neurologist opined. I don’t know about that, but I was a successful student, to the extent that grades are a measure of that. And I suppose that, as a writer-editor by trade, I qualify as a “professional,” whatever that means. (Compensation-wise, compared with doctors and lawyers—the standard-bearers among professionals—I’m not even a semi-pro.) Anyway, I do, in fact, have variations on this dream all the time.

Sometimes it literally is the exam scenario, where I’m sweating bullets in a desperate attempt to pass a test that reads like hieroglyphics. More often, I find, the situation hearkens back to my newspaper days, and I’m well past deadline—being hounded by an unamused editor to turn in a story that I can’t find the words to complete. Oddly, though, I tend to be back in Savannah, Georgia—or, rather, in some odd dream-form of that city, rather than in High Point, North Carolina—the actual scene of my earliest reporting days and my worst real-life abuses of deadlines.

In Savannah, I most often wrote feature stories or film reviews that carried soft deadlines—Friday, say, or next week. In High Point, on the other hand, where I worked for an afternoon newspaper in the days when those still existed, my deadline usually was five or 10 minutes ago. I struggled constantly, in my one-finger typing mode, to condense into a concise and coherent 15- or 20-column-inch story the highlights of a city council meeting, or of a five-hour planning and zoning commission meeting that had droned on well past midnight. (To this day I shudder at the words “public hearing,” envisioning 10 or 15 citizens lined up behind a microphone to repetitively, and at great length, rail against what they deem tyrannical government regulation. All this for the clear purpose of denying me the chance to spend even a fraction of my evening at home. My attitude toward this form of participatory democracy wasn’t sterling.)

Of the two cities, Savannah was where I felt more displaced, though. So perhaps that makes it a better setting for anxiety-related dreams. Although I made some lasting friendships in Savannah, I found it to be an insular city with horribly oppressive heat and humidity where I never really felt comfortable, emotionally or literally. My time there was mostly unhappy until Lynn rescued me. I was in my early 30s, with no plans or prospects beyond perhaps moving on to another newspaper that was less bad and maybe paid a bit more. Whatever deadline pressure I might have felt in those days was psychic: Was this all there would be for me at age 40? At 50? How could I possibly write a new chapter? How would that story even read?

In other words, if the “final exam/test” dream and its fellow travelers reflect our fears of not measuring up or being in control of our life, Savannah is the perfect setting for them in my case. And I can guess why such fears continue to dog me into late middle age. While I do feel in control of my life now, in no way do I feel deserving of the cozy space in which I find myself.

If you’d have told my 33-year-old self in 1991—the year before I married Lynn and moved to DC—that in 2016 I’d be living the good life, by most emotional and economic measures, in Bethesda, Maryland, I might have retorted, “Yeah, right! And I suppose OJ Simpson will get away with murder, terrorists will topple the World Trade Center, and people will deem it necessary to record every last moment of their narcissistic lives on electronic devices.”

Do I measure up to my current station in life? Am I worthy? Not a chance. I mean, I’m incredibly grateful to be where I am. But my subconscious would seem to be rendering judgment. It’s screaming, “Imposter!”

So, again, dreams. “They” say we have them every night, whether we remember or not. I seldom do. And even then, it’s mostly skeletal details. This in itself no doubt says something unflattering about me. That I’m hiding something from myself. Or, maybe, that I lack the cerebral tenacity to yank my dreams from the recesses of darkness into the bright light of day.

I wonder, though, if my poor recall isn’t a defense against boring myself. Because the fact is, when I’m not worrying about failing a test or missing a deadline, the bits and pieces of my dreams that I tend to remember typically are maddeningly mundane.

The very word “dream” connotes “not necessarily real,” right?  And “flights of fancy encouraged,” yes? Other people’s dreams sometimes involve actual flight—as in, “Look at me! I am soaring through the sky, using my arms as wings!” People dream about achieving orgiastic heights in sexual bacchanals, or of doing fantastically noble and heroic things that earn them global acclaim.

Me? I dream about things like ... going to the store. Or mowing the lawn. Or walking down the street. These are Things That I Really Do. Things That Are Not Interesting. I mean, the store I patronize in the dream might not be one I’d ordinarily enter. The lawn might not be MY lawn. The street might not be one I recognize. But, so what? Where’s the fantasy? Where’s the excitement? For chrissakes, I’d settle for a touch of whimsy now and then. Am I really such a dullard that even my subconscious is utterly pedestrian? It’s pretty depressing.

The other night, though, I had a very disturbing dream. Uncharacteristically, I woke up remembering a lot of it, which I immediately wrote down. Basically, I had the sense that I was out West somewhere. I was staying at a hotel, as was a high school friend of mine and his wife. Only, the wife was an American woman I’d never seen before, as opposed to the German woman to whom he’s actually married. I have no idea why we were there, other than that we were going to run together on a nearby track.

But then somehow I got lost and separated from my hotel. I grew increasingly panicked as I tried to find my way back. At one point I thought I had, but I’d arrived at the wrong hotel. Somebody told me the one I was looking for was four and a half miles away. I crept unseen into the back seat of a car that seemed to be headed in the right direction. The driver freaked out when I announced myself. He pulled over. He may have kicked me out, because later I was in another car, with a couple who brought me back to their place. They were asking me what I wanted for breakfast when I bolted from their house, desperate to get back to where I needed to be.

Finally I was so disoriented and distraught that, when I saw a car coming toward me, I decided I’d end my misery by jumping to my death in front of it. But then some self-preservation instinct must have kicked in, because I told myself, in the dream, that this situation might not be real, and I advised myself to try waking up—as opposed to imprinting my skull onto an automobile’s grillwork. Whereupon I indeed awakened. In a cold sweat. Never having been so happy to be in my own bed.

I’ve no idea what, of anything, all of that meant. It strikes me as a variation on the test dream, in that I wasn’t in control of anything. Perhaps this was just me, again, feeling like I don’t measure up to where I’ve ended up in life. Who the hell knows? Is there even consensus on whether dreams are truly significant? Is a dream sometimes—most of the time—just a dream? (Note to self: Try Googling that sometime, instead of the name a bad horror movie you watched for 20 minutes while doing crunches.)

What I do know, though, is that I’m due soon to fly to Spokane so I can cross Washington and Idaho off my list of states in which I’ve run for one uninterrupted hour at least once. I’ll note here that Spokane, in juxtaposition to Bethesda, definitely is out West. I’ll be staying in hotels. And, of course, I’ll be running—though on streets, not on a track. All of which is a little eerie, and makes me a tad nervous, in an I’ve-probably-watched-too-many-Twilight Zone episodes kind of way.

So, what might happen at the 4.5-mile mark of one of my runs in Washington state or Idaho? There won’t be an oncoming car involved, right?

I’ll hope for an outcome every bit as workmanlike as my dreams tend to be.

Dispirit of '76

My friend Maryann in Philadelphia has a boyfriend whose last name is Schmidt. I’ve not yet met him. The other day, I asked her in an email if she’s asked him if he’s seen the movie About Schmidt, since it’s, well, about Schmidt and all. The whole idea struck me as hilarious. I was thinking about how, should he respond that he hasn’t seen it, Maryann could mock-seriously question his self-awareness and his commitment to introspection. “It’s about Schmidt! How could you not be curious?”

Never mind that About Schmidt came out 14 years ago and was hardly a blockbuster. In it, Jack Nicholson plays a curmudgeonly retiree and recent widower who finds it difficult to relate to other people, including his daughter. His emotional breakthrough finally comes when he weeps for an African kid he’s never met, to whom he’s been sending money and letters through a charity organization. I knew when I asked Maryann the question that it was quite possible that her Schmidt had never so much as heard of the movie, let alone seen it. But I was pretty sure that Maryann, a film buff, at least had heard of About Schmidt. Which gave me the opening to ask my utterly hilarious question. Which of course, like many things that strike me as comic gold, went over like the proverbial lead zeppelin, per a comment by The Who’s Keith Moon that became (with a slight spelling change) the name of another iconic rock band.

Predictably in retrospect, Maryann earnestly wrote back, “I haven’t asked [boyfriend] if he’s seen About Schmidt. Is it good? Would I like it?” Cripes! I internally shouted the words of mad scientists in a hundred 1950s horror movies—“The fools! They know nothing of my work!” But I simultaneously understood that this gag was uproarious only to me, so what I wrote back was, “Never mind. That’s not the point. But yeah, I thought it was good, from what I remember.” I do suspect she’d like the flick, but that’s neither here nor there.

Anyway, the exchange got me to thinking about Jack Nicholson and, by extension, Gene Hackman. I say “by extension” because both actors were incredibly prolific for decades and then disappeared from films seemingly overnight. There are other actors and actresses and one-time media darlings in other realms who fall into this category, although I can’t name any at the moment. What they all have in common is that we—or at least I, but I don’t think I’m alone in this—only take note of their long absence from public view when they one day resurface on the cover of a supermarket tabloid, looking like the hideous portrait of Dorian Gray, gasping for one last breath beneath a headline alleging shocking elder abuse. Although the “facts” in the articles always seem dubious—was the housekeeper really force-feeding dog food to the former Oscar winner, and pounding on his bedsores with a baseball bat?—there’s the realization that the photo itself, while horribly unflattering, actually does accurately reflect what must be the age of the long out-of-sight, out-of-mind celebrity. It’s the moment at which we understand that, while we were going about our lives and not paying attention, yesterday’s stars were getting Old As Hell.

I just now Googled Jack Nicholson. It turns out that he’s 79. Which isn’t quite ancient, but, given the hard-charging life he’s led, it probably works out to most other people’s 90. According to Wikipedia, he hasn’t retired from films, but he’s very selective about his roles. The way I read this is, “Only cameos I can squeeze between my 10 am and 2 pm naps.” My guess is that Jack is hoping similarly-aged director Woody Allen can write him into the final minutes of a period piece about Casanova in which the great lover bags his final conquest—played by previous Allen cast member Scarlett Johansson—then dies a happy man.

In the long hiatus between my last blog post and this one, a lot has happened in both the big, wide world and my little one. High-profile police shootings. High profile-shootings of police. The nightclub deaths in Orlando. Brexit. The continued rise, then self-inflicted fall (fingers crossed it’s permanent) of Donald Trump. At our house, the biggest and worst news was the death on August 1 of our beloved cat Tess, who, beset with diabetes and other serious health issues for years, nevertheless had outlived her nine feline lives in relative comfort until she suddenly and dramatically gave up the ghost. We got a vet to make a house call and end her suffering.

Also, I turned 58 in early July, and at around the same time received in the mail a postcard inviting me to my 40-year high school reunion. Although it’s simple math—both 1958 + 58 and 1976 + 40 equal 2016—it’s somehow a lot to take in. I was talking about this over dinner in DC last night with my friend Erika, who I’ve known since college and see once or twice a year, as she lives locally. We hashed over old times, happy times, sad times, regrets and retirement plans, as two friends of a certain age will do. Neither of us could quite believe that we’re the age we are, the retirement talk notwithstanding. We don’t feel as if we’re on the cusp of 60. We look nothing like those scary walking-dead celebrities in the tabloids, if we do say so ourselves. (That written, I’d like to give a tip of the hat to hair dyes.) When Erika and I talked last night about the upcoming post-work phase of our lives, it was with enthusiasm for the activities we plan to pursue, not dread of the senescence into which we eventually may sink. Still, time does march on.

This 40th high school reunion thing is a bit of a conundrum for me—and not because attending it would confirm what’s undeniable anyway—that I’m old enough to be having a 40th high school reunion. Rather, it’s a question of motives, utility, and who else will be there.

I remember my 20th high school reunion as if it was yesterday. I’d attended it neither for the joy of seeing hundreds of former classmates I barely knew as a teenager—I wasn’t popular and had only a small clique of friends—nor to reinvigorate my school spirit. I attended zero football games in the three years I attended Grimsely Senior High School in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I have no absolutely recollection of how the school’s sports teams fared during those years. Last-period pep rallies were my cue to drive to nearby Krispy Kreme for a late-afternoon doughnut or three. But I knew that a few key former classmates would be at that 20-year reunion, so I wanted to see them. I also had it in mind to show off Lynn to anyone who might have thought, back in the Gerald Ford years, that a pudgy one-handed doofus like me would never marry, period, let alone score a fox. (Probably no one had even considered my future marital status, but that lonely scenario had been my own working assumption.) Also, by 1996 I wasn’t pudgy anymore. In fact, I fancied that I looked pretty damn good at age 38, all things considered. As the date neared, I savored the prospect of wearing a name tag bearing a yearbook photo of fat-faced Eric Ries.

I deemed that 20th reunion a success. I had some great conversations with people I hadn’t seen in years, although I also drank too much and missed some other opportunities. I enjoyed the fact that several people almost didn’t recognize me (until they spotted the telltale empty sleeve) because I’d aged for the better and not (per many former sports stars and cheerleaders) for the worse. Lynn had a good time. I felt proud to have her as my date for the evening and my partner in life.

But now it’s 20 years later, as hard as that is to believe. One of the classmates with whom I spoke at length that night in 1996 killed herself last year. My closest friend from my high school class already has told me he hasn’t the time off, spare cash or inclination to drive over from the eastern part of the state. I’m not on Facebook, so I don’t keep up with a vast network of peripheral friends and acquaintances the way a lot of people do, but I’ve put out a few email feelers to former classmates who I’d like to see. No answers yet.

With Tess’s death, Lynn is freed from her intensive care needs, and we can leave our dog Bean with friends. My mom has long griped about never seeing Lynn when I visit Greensboro, so the reunion weekend would be as good a time as any for us to visit with my parents, who are even older than Jack Nicholson. But, what if none of the people I want to show up can make it? What point will it serve to spend a few hours milling around awkwardly in a refurbished downtown theater amid a bunch of near-strangers, while overenthusiastic emcees and cheesy music seek to gin up nostalgia for a time and place that I’d in many ways just as soon forget, and largely have? Do I want to be dragging Lynn into that situation, however game she might be?

On the other hand, maybe I’d look around the room and determine that time hasn’t ravaged me to the extent that it has others, and that’d make me feel good about myself. Perhaps I’d surprise myself by feeling real kinship with a group of people with whom I share only a thin slice of the past, but many of whom I’m unlikely ever to see again. Still, are those sufficient reasons to plunk down nearly a hundred bucks for the two of us and Do This Thing?

At the moment I’m thinking probably yes. Especially if my emails bear fruit, but perhaps even if not. Because, however young I may feel in my mind that I am, the cold, hard facts are that I’m old and getting older. It'll only be a few hours of my time, and it could be fun. It probably won’t be dreadful. Anyway, there’ll be alcohol, although I’d best go a little easier on that this time around.

I feel that I’ve got plenty of life in me yet. But as Jack Nicholson, Gene Hackman and other once-hot celebrities attest, in the seeming blink of an eye you can come to resemble a sad victim of time (and, possibly, of cruel caretakers as well). So, I’m thinking that maybe I should engage with my fellow members of the Class of 1976 at least one more time while we’re all still upright and lucid.

Maybe I’ll even outline the About Schmidt gag to somebody, since I’ll have no investment in his or her reaction. Maybe somebody will get it, and will laugh. That would be sweet. A happy memory to consider 10 years from now, when the next reunion postcard arrives in the mail.

Kind of a Big Hairy Deal

You may or may not have seen the viral video of the Texas woman in the Chewbacca mask. I knew nothing about it until it had been tweeted, texted and emailed around  the planet a few times. Somebody told Lynn about it. She, in turn, told me.

She’d been highly skeptical that it would amuse her to the extent that it had many millions of viewers before her. And even after she informed me that it had, indeed, sent her into hysterics, I was a reluctant viewer. Why? Because—take your pick here—(a) we are considerably more discriminating in our tastes than are the stupid masses, or (b) we are humor snobs.

This video originated on Facebook, for crying out loud! I’ll tell you how many hours a week Lynn and I spend on Facebook. Zero hours. That’s how many. Why? Because the vast majority of what’s on Facebook is time-sucking, self-absorbed crap, that’s why. (Not that we generalize or anything. And I'll have you know that my writing a blog is something entirely different from self-absorption. No, I won’t tell you how it’s different. Just shut up.)

As it turned out, in our estimation, the hoi polloi actually got this one right.

OK, I didn’t find the Chewbacca Mask Woman’s video quite as hilarious as had Lynn, because I am, if possible, even snob—, um, more exacting in my judgments, than is she when it comes to What’s Really Funny. But I must say, the giddy laughter of that Texas woman having the time of her life channeling a fur-faced Star Wars character is super infectious. It’s like how the cast of the old Carol Burnett Show used to crack each other up on camera, lapsing out of character in the middle of a skit. Their laughter somehow reflexively became ours, sitting at home in our gaudy 1970s fashions.

But with Chewbacca Mask Woman it’s more than just High Silly. Her laughter in the video is so explosive, uncontrolled and joyful. It’s self-deprecating and defiant at the same time. Hers is the unrehearsed, unrestrained happiness of a person in the midst of pleasure that has no any particular rhyme, reason or bounds. It’s primal bliss, in a way—like what prehistoric humans might have experienced when they first located their funny bones. Chewbacca Mask Woman whoop-growls in concert with the mask’s sound effects in a way that says, “I’m aware that this entire situation is ridiculous—a grown woman buying a children's item and absolutely Losing It when she sees how it makes her look and sound. But I will stay in this euphoric sweet spot for as long as I possibly can, because, well, why wouldn’t I?”

When Chewbacca Mask Woman says she’s tempted to drive around town with the mask on, I totally get it. Prolong the high and share the wealth! Teach the world to sing in imperfect harmony! Evangelize mirth in a largely mirthless world! But I’m glad that she apparently did not subsequently don and drive. America’s drivers already are plenty distracted at the wheel. They don’t need, also, to encounter a chortling Chewbacca in the turn lane.

I wasn’t yet thinking about Chewbacca Mask Woman earlier today as I sifted through the small stack of newspaper articles, op-ed pieces and entertainment items I’d printed out as possible blog fodder. A motley and largely grim collection it was. These were some of the headlines: “Poll: Election 2016 Shapes Up As a Contest of Negatives” (Trump-Clinton presidential race now a statistical dead heat), “Stephen King Raises Cry of Alarm Against Terrifying Orange-Skinned Monster” (600+ authors sign an anti-Trump manifesto), “Primed To Fight” (about the growing number of armed anti-government militia members in the United States) and “Sanders’s Scorched-Earth Campaign is a Gift To Trump” (Bernie helps the Donald by staying in the race and further souring voters on Hillary).

Do you by any chance see a pattern there?

If you’re guessing that I am petrified by the prospect of ignorant, childish, conspiracy-spouting, dangerous, megalomaniacal Donald Trump (how do you really feel, Ries?) quite possibly becoming the next POTUS—and more than a little depressed that Sanders has become the GOP-aiding Ralph Nader of this election cycle, and that this is how the literary intelligentsia intends to Make a Difference this fall—you are correct.

(After I’d read about the “Open Letter To the American People” that “Writers Speak Out Against Donald Trump” has written to rally the populace to outrage, I exclaimed to a workmate, in the imagined voice of the instantly-sobered American people, “What?! Michael Chabon’s against Trump?! That tears it! He just lost my vote!” My coworker added, “I can’t in good conscience vote for anyone Dave Eggers deems unworthy of our highest office!”)

But then I came across the lone happy news clip in my printout pile—the one that got me to thinking about Chewbacca Mask Woman, and about how therapeutic it is to laugh with abandon, heedless of all the storm clouds in our skies.

The headline was not in itself happy, but the place that it took me was: “Alan Young, the Affable Owner of ‘Mr Ed,’ Dies at 96.”

As the obituary pointed out, Young had a very long and impressive resume as a radio and television personality, film actor and, in his career’s final act, voiceover artist in animated films. But to Americans of a certain age, including me, he first and foremost was architect Wilbur Post, described perfectly by the New York Times as “an unlikely second fiddle—the hapless straight man to a talking horse.”

Mr Ed aired on CBS from 1961 to 1966. I was only 8 years old at the end of its run, so I know the show mostly from reruns (which continue to be broadcast on various cable TV channels). Even as a kid I surely recognized that a talking horse was a ludicrous premise—if no more so than say, a favorite Martian, a suburban witch or an ageless Persian genie on Florida’s Space Coast. But if Mr Ed was fluff, it was smartly written and thoroughly winning fluff.

The horse was the star, and his dubbed words the catalysts, but Young was the key. The story goes that legendary comedian George Burns, whose production company created the show, told his casting director, “Get Alan Young. He’s the kind of guy a horse would talk to.” And he was! Young was a gifted comic actor who provided precisely the combination of good-natured smirk, forgiving anger and duped confusion that his role as nominal “owner” of the irrepressible Ed demanded. Young’s Wilbur Post was the perfect all-American goofball—the actor’s English birth and Canadian upbringing notwithstanding. Wilbur was Mr Ed’s protector and foil—his buddy in the barn and the butt of the jokes.

One of the online obituaries of Young imbedded a video clip from Mr Ed that I vaguely remembered. For some absurd reason that’s beyond my recall, Wilbur and Ed are at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Wilbur is talking with Leo Durocher, the team’s real-life manager at that time, during batting practice. Ed stands at home plate with a bat dangling from his mouth. One of the players suggests it would be a great publicity gag for ace southpaw Sandy Koufax to pitch to the horse.

Well, you can guess the rest. Ed wallops the future hall of famer’s offering. Wilbur implores his equine pal to slide ahead of the throw to the plate. The sight of the charging palomino sends the Dodgers’ catcher leaping up onto the batting-cage netting and hanging on for dear life. Unchallenged, Mr Ed—now a sliding as well as a talking horse, thanks to special effects—completes his inside-the-park home run and cockily shakes the infield dirt from his mane.

“That’s the smartest horse I’ve ever seen!” Durocher exclaims, praising Ed’s hitting process and base-running savvy. (It’s not, however, a comment on Ed’s vocabulary, as the horse speaks only to Wilbur—and to those he pranks on the phone.)

“Ed’s not that smart,” Wilbur responds. “He missed second base.”   

 Ha! God, I loved that show—from the catchy opening song (“A horse is a horse, of course of course …”) to the closing credits. Mr Ed was crazy like a fox. So stupid that it was brilliant. Reading Alan Young’s obit and watching that clip brought it all back to me.

It brought me back, too, to Chewbacca Mask Woman, and to the profound truth underlying her simple message that life is all about about—or, rather, that life should be all about—the little things. The things that cumulatively hold the power to get us through the day, whatever the trials and challenges the wider world poses. The things that might fuel us, if only we’d recognize them and let them work their incremental magic. The things in our daily lives that not only don't hinder us, but that actually help us—because they bespeak kindness, or touch us in some way, or provide the glorious release of making us laugh out loud.

When I was watching Chewbacca Mask Woman laugh her silly face silly, when I was watching Mr Ed best Sandy Koufax to Wilbur’s utter delight, I wasn’t thinking of anything other than how happy I was in that moment. My mind was not on the rise of Donald Trump and what it Says About This Country. It wasn’t on an increasingly angry, armed America that I don’t understand and feel powerless to change. It wasn’t even on whether Chewbacca Mask Woman, when she’s not modeling Star Wars products, is politically representative of the Hard-Right Texas with which I so passionately would love to mess. All I was doing in those moments was laughing. It felt awesome. It was that simple.

I’ll probably always be distrustful of the alleged hilarity of videos that become web phenomena. I’m hard-wired to assume that if everybody loves something, it’s almost certainly overrated. But I’ll concede that some video viruses are positively—and I mean that literally—infectious.

If only that had more staying power. Perhaps that's something we all could work on.