Years ago I saw Barbara Walters interview Jack Nicholson on one of her specials. The British actor Hugh Grant had just been busted for solicitation, so Barbara asked Jack why someone as goodlooking and famous and rich as Hugh Grant would require the services of prostitutes.

Jack donned his patented devilish grin and said, “Peculiarities. Peculiarities.”

Which brings us to Louis CK.

I first caught Louis on the Letterman Show back in the days of VCRs when I prerecorded Dave for civilized midmorning viewing. If I remember correctly, Louis didn’t do standup that night but walked over and took a seat next to Dave. Louis started riffing on the entitlement of whiny airline passengers who carp about minor inconveniences while soaring o’er the plains of Nebraska where wagon trains once rambled through “Injun” territory in months-long treks. 

“You’re sitting in a seat in the air, for Christsakes!”

[c.f. Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.]

Earlier this evening, perched on a barstool at Chico Feo, I almost texted my wife Caroline, who is in New York City, to complain that my boredom was approaching John Berryman red alert levels:

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, and gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself and its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

John Berryman

But I didn’t want to darkcloud any fun Caroline was having, and anyway, I got into a conversation with a travelling nurse named Elise who is doing preop duty for a couple of months at Roper Hospital where my late wife Judy Birdsong stayed every other two weeks getting 96 hours of continuous chemo during the first stint of her cancer. Yet, the thing is, I don’t have a negative feeling about Roper. I told Elise how I had come to appreciate the nurses there. They were absolutely wonderful. They knew/know life from a perspective of pain. They are brothers and sisters of mercy. 

I asked her what she was reading. She said she didn’t enjoy reading, had never enjoyed reading, that she would rather “watch things,” so of course I told her I was novelist, which elicited headshaking and a rueful chuckle. 

We continued to make small talk. I asked her superficial questions about her life, thinking I might create a character like her for a minor role in some future fiction, maybe a confidant. I appreciated her forthrightness.^[1]

On my walk home, Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumbs Blues” got stuck in my head, so I started singing it, walking along singing, checking out the afternoon’s fading, shimmering, almost nervous sunlight. When I-and-I am afflicted by these songs looping in my head, the only cure is to listen to the song as a form of exorcism.

Like Louis CK’s disgruntled flier, I had forgotten that I live in an age of miracles. Now I am sitting in front of my computer listening to Bob sing “Tom Thumb’s Blues” and reading the lyrics against the static background of the iconic Highway 61 Revisited album cover that – look – I’ve conjured from a Cloud and presented below.

But now I realize that for fifty years I have misheard the lyrics. For example, the first line isn’t “When you’re down in Wallace”; it’s “When you’re down in Juarez,” which makes a lot more since given that “Sweet Melinda speaks good English” and “the authorities just sit around and boasts.” In other words, the song is about being down and out in Mexico. I also mistook “Rue Morgue Avenue” for “Remark Avenue,” which I sort of like better. My favorite line from the song is “Well, I started off on burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff,” which I always thought was “hardest,” which definitely would be better, going from burgundy to heroin, instead of going from burgundy to Jim Beam. 

Anyway, I’ve exiled my boredom to an ice floe in Antarctica. “It’s all good,” as the young people say after you’ve bumped into them and apologized.

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^[1] “Forthrightfulness” ought to be a word.