“Do You Think You Can Manage a Laugh?”

That’s what she said, just a few minutes ago, with a look over the top of her glasses.

“Why, yes,” I replied. “I was just thinking what it must be like for you to be lying in bed in the next room while I run through ‘Itchy Chicken’ half a dozen times at 10 o’clock at night!”

Hahaha. I’d turned it down, quite a lot actually, but you couldn’t say it was quiet. At that moment I was especially grateful I had a wife who’d let me practice my electric guitar 30 feet away for an hour and a half while she was settling in for the evening (you old married guys know what I mean by “settling in,” right?) — grateful, but also aware of how close I’d been pushing it all day.

This health care train wreck, and that’s what it looks like from reading too many blogs — I was ranting in the comments again today, put me in a CAGE! — well, it just grabs the tenderest, saddest part of me. I grew up thinking Democrats were the good guys, like Hopalong Cassidy, but the lesson of our time is that there are no good guys and we’re on our own. Ultimately this is probably just peachy, in the same way my mother throwing me out of her house was last August. (Give it a minute, it’ll hit you.) And then something else set me off in a different way.

I have a friend I’ve never met, like a lot of us do these days. He’s a software engineer who’s had his own business and worked for some of the best. Today he suffered a major blow. Times being hard, he’d applied for a job he was way more than qualified for, had two encouraging interviews, but was unexpectedly turned down . What I didn’t know until six hours ago was that he’d been fighting to make a living for the last few years, apparently — why does this sound familiar? — and now all the memories were flooding in on him. The psycho-emotional effect of this cascade is something I’m familiar with, to say the least, so I shot him some quick counseling, because he sounded really bad. If I tell you all this transpired over direct messages from Twitter, would that make a difference? I hope not, even if the medium makes you laugh, because the guy’s plight really moved me. I know what he was feeling.

There must be millions of people in similar fixes. What I hate most is what that does to people, how it hurts them in their own hearts.

I think I understand something now. The election we just had wasn’t the one. Maybe none of them can do the trick. But all those people coming together and organizing over the internet, that was different, right? Right?? That meant at least a little something. It had to. We’re all awake and talking. I don’t hear much to talk about, really, mostly just the same old business, but the channels are open. Look how that’s been working in Iran, of all places.

Be here now. That’s all I can do. If you’re living in the present, time dies. We need it to die because we screwed the future, or maybe we didn’t, but in any case I’d rather write or play my guitar. I also must have a terrible life that lets me do these things and not sleep under a bridge, so yes, maybe I can manage a laugh.

Make art or die. Make art AND die. Don’t make any art, die anyway.

Oh.

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